Free WiFi, once a rarity, increasingly easy to find

Five years after the Brewed Awakenings coffee shop in Capital Center became the first hot spot in downtown Providence, free wireless broadband Internet access is widely available throughout the city.
Free WiFi access is offered at a variety of cafés, restaurants and bars, including AS220, Cuban Revolution, Panera, Local 121 and the Starbucks at the Providence Biltmore, one of the few Starbucks where customers don’t have to use T-Mobile’s paid WiFi service.
The growing availability of free WiFi in Providence reflects a national trend, and the city is more or less keeping pace with other cities this size, said Brian Jepson, an editor and programmer at Make magazine and a local technology expert.
“It’s sort of the norm around the country,” he said.
Paid WiFi hot spots are even more widely available in the city, including at the train station in downtown Providence and virtually every hotel in the city, Jepson said, ensuring that business travelers visiting the city are able to surf the Internet and access e-mail from their PDAs and laptop computers throughout their visit.
But business travelers greatly appreciate cities where free WiFi is widely available, he said.
“It just makes it so much easier for someone to work, especially out-of-town people,” Jepson said. “When you’re on the road you make all these little stops – the hotel, the coffee shop, the train station or airport – and every time you go there it’s like, ‘Do you want wireless? Ten bucks for three hours.’ And you’re going to use it for 45 minutes at each place, so at the end of the day you might spend $30 to $50 bucks on wireless fees.”
Other cities, including Portland, Ore., and New York City, have launched free community WiFi service that blanket parts of those cities, making it possible for people to access the Internet while sitting on park benches and traveling in a car or bus.
Jepson said he would like to see Providence host its own community WiFi service some day.
“If Providence can sort of say, ‘OK, everywhere you go in downtown Providence there’s going to be a hot spot called PVD Wireless, and it’s going to be free,’” he said. “That means you can sit around Kennedy Plaza and open your laptop, you can sit around the train station and open your laptop. They just make it easier for people who are trying to do what they do.” •