I recently got back from a trip to Buffalo, NY for a friend’s wedding and I’m left feeling like I narrowly escaped being sucked into a time portal back to 5 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, for a city in the midst of the rust belt, Buffalo is not an impossible place for a web developer to continue the work of the Intergalactic Web. There are safe havens like Spot Coffee, offering free WiFi, that will help see you through the industrial muck. For someone like me, even the slightest interruption in internet connectivity is like cutting into my oxygen supply, so more than ever I found myself deliberating on city-wide free WiFi plans and wondering what the hells taking so long? Google has been talking about this for over 2 years, but is this the right way?

from Elvis to Internet

Living in San Francisco, we’re pretty well connected to the internet, right? You would think so and in the private sector, we are, but why don’t we have free city-wide WiFi yet? San Francisco has made arrangements with Google to do this at some point and I commend any city having plans to do this, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a universal plan to connect the nation as a whole?

As it stands, cities and counties are expected to take on this task alone. So I ask, when a city such as San Francisco, swarming with developer geeks and internet samurai, still fails to offer free WiFi, what real chance do smaller, more secluded places have? Could we use a model such as IDA Singapore?

In any case, my search for WiFi in Buffalo landed me at the Holiday Inn of all places. Best free WiFi in the city, oddly enough. Though, they seemed to be quite concerned about people, maybe getting the wrong idea…?