Wifi: Free or not ?

When the first public wifi network began to show up, it might have been late 2001 here in Czech Republic. Mainly hotels and the high-end cafés began to share their 128kbit/s line with their customers. But then someone though it's possible to make money out of it. And who's got the infrastructure ? And it wouldn't cost him virtually anything to make a hotspot ? Yes, landline and mobile providers. So former Eurotel and Telecom (merged and bought by O2 by now) decided to start a pilot service. Noone ever in czech republic has been taking money for hour or two of wireless connection. They offered their service to many hotes and pushed it into every single KFC restaurant. And it was free, until they've announced the service officially launched. You send them SMS, they bill you $3, that goes to your current phone bill. and you have the right to use it for hour. Or you can have 2 hours for $5. Or 24 hours for $15.

You can say "it's not really that expensive", but you could have a nice desert instead of 1 hour WiFi. It might been due to lack of propagation, people's lazyness to hassle with the payment or anything else.

The fact is that the service usage dropped after payments were required. T-Mobile did the same and I've never paid them a buck. I've been using the Eurotel's WifiJet (that was the name) with some free coupons, 4 times 5 hour coupon...I've drained them all and paid around 3 hours myself. But that's it. See ? It's free, people use it. It's not free and you think about it...do I really need the internet right now ?

All the cafés that got T-Mobile representative's head stuck in their ass telling them how the hotspot service is great are now ditching them, leaving open wifi for everyone. KFC decided they'll buy the all the network related equipment from O2 and run their own free WiFi in all the restaurants. Even on the Prague airport. Funny thing is that it's the first WiFi network there. Just because the airport didn't like any of those paid hotspot providers' terms.

The internet getting is free again, like it was meant to be when word "hotspot" was invented.

Do you think the "paid" and "free" seesaw will ever flip to free completely ? And flip back again then ? I know it's not possible to kill every paid hotspot provider, but if enough people choose to go to café with free WiFi over a paid one, they might just kill themselves...