This past weekend, we had the good fortune of welcoming a new baby girl into my girlfriend's family. Very cool in its own right, but what was just as much fun for me was being able to build a website around the baby's birth, email everyone in several cities about the birth mere hours after Baby Berge was born, and do it all from a free Wi-Fi hotspot at Stone Creek Coffee in Milwaukee.

There's a story in the San Jose Mercury News about the demise of paid hotspots. Which, if you look around at everyone offering free wireless to attract customers, it's no wonder that the hot spots are going cold. There were several of us at Stone Creek with out wireless cards intact, and no fewer than 5 last night at Kavarna last night that were sitting on their *free* wireless connection (free, less the obligatory purchase you make because you feel like you should).

In my opinion, wireless is going to be just another service that gets tacked on to the expenses like water, trash disposal, a cleaning service, and the people that come to service the coffee machines and such. For the paltry $50- 100/month that it costs to keep this, and the low maintenance required, and the mediocre publicity and WOM/Buzz it offers to bring new customers through the door, I can't see why more businesses aren't adopting Wi-Fi (well, I'm sure there are several, such as hotspot squatters who take up real-estate for several hours in your coffee house for a mere $2.00 cup of coffee).

There's a good chance public WiFi will ultimately be free to consumers, with the costs paid by retailers who want to attract more clientele or by on-screen advertising.

I don't know how this will turn out. But it's clear the market for public WiFi hotspots is evolving in ways no one anticipated two or three years ago, and many pioneers in the hotspot business will become involuntary heroes who sacrifice themselves to show others what not to do.