Off the Digital Leash

Harvard students will no longer need to mooch off Boloco’s free wireless to feed their e-mail addicitions on the way back to their dorms from Lamont. By the summer of 2006, even scholars sans Blackberry can reach the Secure CRT nirvana of perpetual e-mail checking. Harvardians, MITechies—nay, all Cantabrigians—shall rejoice: a wireless blanket will descend on Cambridge.

As a result of collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and the City of Cambridge, students and citizens alike will be able to reap the benefits of free wireless Internet access throughout the entire city. Harvard and MIT have aided Cambridge in its planning of the project by offering technical expertise. The two schools will also incorporate their existing wireless infrastructures into the new network so that the city will not have to start from scratch in creating coverage for the entire city.

Free citywide wireless cannot come soon enough. While the free wireless Internet may make only a marginal difference in the cyber lives of Harvard students, whose dorms, libraries, and lecture halls are already hooked-up havens of Facebooking, Cantabrigians who might not be able to afford Internet access will now have equality of technological opportunity. Those who will benefit most from this upcoming wireless cloud, however, may not have access to computers. It is therefore necessary for Cambridge, perhaps in partnership with corporate sponsors, to facilitate a means of computer access to those who can’t afford the computer or the wireless.

We applaud Cambridge for being one of the first U.S. cities to implement widespread wireless access, and a few others already have plans in the works. Philadelphia, for one, has hired Earthlink to provide wireless to the entire City of Brotherly Love, and it plans to charge citizens a modest subscription fee. San Francisco is currently investigating the prospect of citywide wireless, and, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco officials have received 26 offers from companies willing to provide wireless to the hilly Californian streets.

Though setting up wireless hubs throughout cities will be a pricy and logistically challenging prospect, wireless will increase efficiency for businesses which depend upon the Internet—as well as continue to help lower- and lower-middle-class families log on. We encourage all cities to look into the prospect of going wireless to increase efficiency, and, more importantly, to bridge the technological aspect of the socioeconomic divide.

Because of the immense benefits of turning municipalities into wireless zones, it is important that cities not allow private telecommunications companies to dissuade them from implementing free or low-price Internet access. Private Internet providers should not work against cities as municipal government tries to further the best interests of its residents.

We don’t exactly expect wireless to enhance the local social scene, but free wireless will guarantee at least one thing: Cambridge will always be a hotspot.