For those that thought it was a hot tub, a ready meal or even a nightclub, it seems that public wireless internet also has some educating to do.. People should appraise the technology carefully to see if it meets their needs.” It’s also easy to vote with your laptop and move to another location.But perhaps those service providers seeking lucrative revenues should note a recent Mori poll among home PC users. “The market will be dominated by established operators bundling wireless LAN with other paid-for services. Against this, UK tariffs look expensive so prices will certainly ease.

It will be mostly paid-for at 80 or 90 per cent,” said Mr Dineen.Are prices going to come down? Mr Dineen points to Japan where unlimited access costs $15 a month. “It’s just not sensible to give these services away free and it’s only in certain very competitive industries that we might see this kind of phenomenon – coffee shops for example. Will we pay or won’t we? Richard Dineen, a research director for the analyst and consulting company, Ovum, is sceptical about free wireless LANs destroying paid-for services. A wireless traffic jam is on the cards, say experts, unless a solution can be found.

Co-operative access technology like LocustWorld Wireless Mesh or voluntary congestion agreements are the answer.But the most-pressing concern today is pricing. Some people are also setting up free hotspots or sharing broadband costs across the airwaves. Could the free hotspot in the pub find paid-for users in the hotel next door fuming over their laptops as they access a degraded service? It’s all too easy to swamp an area with WLAN signals, and, even worse, the frequency suffers from interference by microwave ovens, cordless telephones and Bluetooth – connections slow to a crawl.The crowded airwaves won’t be helped by the community groups that are springing up, under the wlan .uk umbrella, to make not-for-profit wireless broadband internet available. “The market could easily be 50/50 paid-for and free – it’s not hard to see how that might happen. However, nobody has ever tried managing a licence-free spectrum before and it changes all the rules.”But what most worries Kewney is this: the 2.4 GHz signals used by adjacent hotspots can interfere with each other – resulting in severely reduced data throughput. They can bundle wireless services in with phone services; that’s a sensible way of trying to do it,” said Kewney. Whether paid-for or free access will win out doesn’t have a simple answer, he says, particularly in a new market that’s rolling out commercial services in an unregulated wireless spectrum that anybody can use.”The sort of charges that BT and others are trying to make are a learning curve – the price will have to come down.