Once the WiFi base station is set up, the marginal cost per user is essentially zero -- which is why a lot of businesses offer free WiFi.
For one base station in one corner coffee shop, that's true. But add in the thousands of businesses in a medium-size city and that marginal cost begins to shoot up. And then, if every store starts doing it, it occupies all available channels and home users can't get a signal in their own house because of a crowded spectrum. Then, once you get 30 or 40 people pushing their cheap router's limits and fighting for 5Mb of bandwidth, it's no longer a practical service.
It only works cheaply because it's
not ubiquitous.
I didn't get that out of the remark.
The remark was: "Free Universal wifi access is simpler, involves less negotiation, is attractive to every hardware owner and is the emerging paradigm."
The only way it's "free" is if the cost is passed on to all customers. It may not be a significant expense individually, but in the aggregate, if every shop deploys wireless networks, we're talking about millions of dollars per year in costs and the complete extinguishing of negotiable channels. It might only work out to $20 per resident per year, but consumers and taxpayers complain about things that cost them pennies each year, and a slow, high-interference mess of hotspots isn't a worthwhile service at
any price.
Using professional-grade equipment instead of a thousand DLink routers is the only responsible, stable, and practical approach from an architectural standpoint. It's also cheaper in the long run to invest in a real high-capacity wireless infrastructure--and doing so requires individuals to pay or taxpayers to foot the multi-billion dollar bill. You already pay your home ISP for your own access--why not just embrace a model which allows you to take that account with you when you leave your house, and let the ISP foot the bill?
You get better, faster, more reliable service and no configuration hassles or a big stack of unnecessary one-off accounts or saving a bunch of network configurations, and you don't have to worry about signal interference except from your residential neighbors. It's a win all around.
I also didn't say that Starbuck's coffee is overpriced. I have no opinion about that at all, if only because I don't drink the stuff.
You said it was $4.00, it's $1.50. If your drink is $4.00, it's not a cup of coffee. Your implication was that their prices are high enough to support free wifi, indicating that you feel their profit margin should be lowered as a result. We all know from experience that no business will cut its margins unless it expects to make up the difference in volume. Starbucks has deemed that unlikely at the present time, or they'd do it. Personally, I don't drink coffee.
I was simply pointing out that services of this kind bring in customers.
If the costs exceed the profits from new customers, doing so is a mistake. Starbucks wifi hotspots aren't cheap to operate, and for their ordinary clientele, the reduction in service quality would probably cause them to
lose sales by switching to free wifi.
Since many customers already have a wifi access plan through their cell phone, home Internet, or business account, and most commercial hotspots allow code-sharing (i.e. T-Mobile users can sign onto AT&T hotspots and their T-Mobile plan is charged directly), it doesn't ultimately cost them. Further, limited-term free access is available to customers who purchase something. No one is burdened by Starbucks' system except people who want to sit in the parking lot and leech.
