There are some good reasons for a free wireless network. For one thing, the idea that alllarge cities have lots of good and competetive is simply not true. On my block there are two choices -and both leave a lot to be desired. One has a tech support staff that is at least 75% useless or worse, but at least their baseline service is not that expensive, and they can get you going without TOO much hassle, although it still takes way too long to provision a line. The other has a system with absolutley no fail-safes in place. They managed to cut off a subscribers voice line when they enrolled a new neighbor on the same line - and it took almost a week and numerous calls from both the existing customer and the prospective customer to get that straigtened out. Their people are also utterly inflexible and trained to absolutley NOT use their heads. And they aren't too cheap either. By the way, if you look at the comparative costs for banwidth btween these cities and some other places, you will see that what we call "competetive" is actually not all that cheap. And I live in a reasonably decent area. There are still reas in NYC where the choices are still down to one - if even that. It's easier to build out a wireless netwrok than a wired one - and it has the added advantage of allowing for real mobility, not just the ability to go to the park with your laptop. For any business that does site based work - either service, delivery or sales calls, the ability to access data from anywhere is not a trivial issue. New York City has exacly one realistic option, and dealing with these guys is so difficult that many organizations simply won't bother. On top of that, this option is hardly "competetive". Even the cheapest broadband, by the way, is going to be difficult for people on really tight budgets - and these are often people who could really use the connectivity. And, please don't tell me about using the library. For many reasons, that's either not an option (not every library has them, and besides they often have restricted hours), or there are other barrieirs to using the libraries.