San Francisco WiFi and Culture

I found a number of the comments on this "Free WiFi in San Francisco" story interesting. In particular, I got a kick out of the comments that suggested offering WiFi to citizens freely or cheaply was some sort of scam designed to buy re-election. There were also posts that suggested WiFi would only be useful to "geeks."

Not surprisingly, not everyone knows who the mayor of San Francisco is. Gavin Newsom, with an approval rating of 80% or more, probably isn't scrambling to scam his way into reelection. More to the point, is providing what the people want a scam? This is in the job description.

A lot of the comments on the Slashdot story illustrate how different the culture and public opinion of San Francisco/Silicon Valley is from much of the rest of the country. Free/cheap WiFi actually makes a lot of sense for this city. There are probably nearly as many geeks (by national standards) than non-geeks. However, I'm curious if anybody is looking into if it's healthly to bombard the city with more electrical fields.

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