Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 162

There’s nothing that gladdens the heart more than a bit of chutzpah. Earlier this month two telemarketers made more than $650,000 by cold-calling people and charging them between $30 and $100 to join the national ‘Do-Not-Call’ service… which is naturally a free service.

You. Have. To. Admire. Their. Cheek. In the same way, hats off to Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. In his younger days, the good Colonel used to tour fairgrounds with ‘the world’s smallest horse’ that turned out to be a pony buried in sand. No suspicious minds in that audience then.

But sometimes what looks to be a blag is nothing of the kind and what you see is what you bloody well get. New Microsoft on the block, Google is doing exactly that in the gorgeous city of San Francisco by offering to provide blanket wireless internet coverage for free.

There is no small print in this offer, it will only cost Google around $20 million to cover all 49 square miles of the city, small feed to a company that has NASA as a partner, both strategically and geographically… and the PR value will be immeasurable.

If all goes to plan, San Francisco will become the world’s first wireless city, a prize that Taipei, San Jose, Amsterdam and New York are all trying to win. In the UK, we have the prospect of London becoming the world’s LAST wireless city. Finding free Wi-Fi in the heart of London isn’t easy and sometimes there's no other choice than to pay for it.

Which, just like the telemarketers I mentioned earlier, is where you have to raise your cappuccinos to Starbucks. Not only have they convinced a world to spend a fortune on posh coffee, they’ve also charged people like me to use Wi-Fi on its premises, a service that costs next to nothing to provide.

Yep, it's people like me who would have believed Colonel Tom and his little horse, but sometimes it's not the pony that's buried in the sand, it's one's own head. So from now on, no more paying for Wi-Fi, it's just not worth it.