WiFi is great! You get freedom of mobility and high speed at low costs. But what’s even better is implementing WiFi over a wide area, and having access to the wireless network for free. But with Google limiting its free WiFi initiative to some San Francisco localities, and with government-led efforts for city-wide free WiFi still in the early planning stages, consumers’ only options still boil down to commercial WiFi providers.

However, there is this new trend of endusers sharing their broadband Internet access over their private WiFi networks. The aim is to have a large enough member base for the network to turn into a mesh big enough to cover a wide area of the country. Several groups, such as Radiuz, ShareMyWiFi, FON, and a handful of other startups offer a method to convert one’s existing WiFi-enabled broadband connection into secure, free WiFi hotspots, in exchange for likewise gaining access to others’ hotspots (for use when traveling, for instance).

That’s a cool idea. However, I tend to think that unless these groups band together to form a larger consortium of users, the idea of WiFi sharing will fail, simply because no single group can become a network large enough to be useful. Having free access is good, but if the hotspots are too far apart from each other, then it’s like having a mobile phone service with too many dead spots even in an urban area.