But hang on a minute. How are companies like Vivato going to make money by giving away all this access for free? Vivato's technology appealed to Spokane not only because it's hugely powerful but also because it's absurdly inexpensive. You can get a Vivato transmitter for under $10,000, plus maintenance and bandwidth costs. "It's something like the Internet in the mid-'90s," Stalter says. "Remember when everything was free? You put it in, then you ask yourself how you're going to make money." His idea is eventually to flip Spokane's HotZone to a pay service. He will enlist local businesses to sell prepaid Internet-access cards to people wandering through the HotZone. But Stalter might also recall how scores of well-intentioned dotcoms went bust in the late 1990s when they tried to get consumers to pay for what they were used to getting for free.

	INVISIBLE LINK Whether you're keeping your home safe or watching movies by the pool, wires aren't required PHOTOS FROM SPOKANE Sleepy Spokane, Wash., has a secret: it's the wireless hot spot of the future
	Wi-Fi Gets Rolling The Web is going wireless in offices, schools, RV parks and more—transforming our lives like no technology since the Internet itself

Not every city cloud passes the cost along to the consumer. In Austin, Texas, local businesses maintain 84 free wi-fi hot spots networked together, and the companies split the cost between them; in theory, they make the money back by attracting bandwidth-hungry customers. "I like the idea of the technology," Richard Mackinnon, president of the Austin Wireless City Project, says of Spokane's HotZone. "The problem is more with the finances behind it. When you have the Zone, you're reduced to a single player: one big person has to pay for everything. That person is going to be tempted to recoup the costs." Free wi-fi enthusiasts have a certain zealotry about them, not unlike vegans and Naderites, but in this case you can kind of see their point. "There will always be free wi-fi, and there will always be paid wi-fi," Mackinnon says. "Pay is going to put it out there that free is less secure or less bandwidth, but hopefully there are always going to be people who realize that's b.s." If free and pay wi-fi go head to head in Spokane, it's easy to imagine people voting with their pocketbooks.

Will people actually pay for wi-fi? Can Vivato pull money out of thin air? Maybe not with prepaid cards, but, as Stalter says, the technology is way ahead of the applications, and over time alternative revenue sources are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. I thought of one myself, when I got back from Spokane. Parking in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., is so tight, it took 45 minutes of circling the block before I found a space. I spent that time doing a thought experiment: What if Vivato lit up my neighborhood with wi-fi? Then you could have curbside sensors that page your car the instant a spot opens up ... maybe a heads-up display on the windshield, showing a map of where the perfect spot is.

I ran this idea past the folks at Vivato. They love it. But won't everybody converge on the same prime spot as soon as it frees up? Not if you fork over extra to get notified, say, 30 seconds earlier. "You pay a premium for that!" says Kevin Ryan, Vivato's V.P. of marketing and business development, his eyes gleaming with invisible wi-fi light. "You're the platinum customer!" There you have it. The future of free urban wi-fi looks bright. It just might cost a little more than we thought.

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