Of course, I would never connect to someone else's unsecured wireless network. Oh dear me no.

One of the things that always staggers me about the current state of technology is how quickly it changes. (And people who know me well are probably sick to death of me banging on about it. To those people, I apologise. Go and look at pretty photos of London while I talk to everyone who hasn't got bored.) Ten years ago, the Internet was slow, video was available only in postage-stamp sized RealVideo clips, Google was little more than a gleam in its founders' eyes, message forums and Java-based chatrooms were about as far as interactivity went, and the concept of MMORPGs was limited to text-based MUDs.

Nowadays, the web is growing faster than ever before, hosting costs are tumbling (my total costs for Ballpoint Banana currently come in at under £10 per year), and speeds are soaring. However, some aspects have not changed that much, and one of them is the physical infrastructure used to deliver all this shiny content into our vastly overpowered computers. Despite valiant efforts by Virgin (among others) to get optical fibres deployed on a major scale, pretty much everyone in the UK uses existing cables – either their phone lines or their TV cables. Well, apart from the 9% who are still on dialup for some unfathomable reason.

Wireless may be gaining popularity among home users, but it's only once the cable has made it into the user's home that this can happen. To some extent, that's a good thing, as it means the user has complete control over the hardware they have, instead of the ISP saying that customers need a specific type of wireless access. However, it is dramatically stifling the growth of public wireless.

"Public wireless", in this case, means access to the Internet that you can get anywhere (or anywhere reasonably urban, anyway). It's something of a niche at the moment, its use generally limited to people who carry laptops with them. However, with the entry into the market of ultraportable laptops like the Asus Eee, or phone-sized devices like my Nokia N800, people are starting to want to get access to the web wherever they are. Oh, and they don't really want to have to squint at it, either.

There's been two main attempts to bring public wireless to reality, and again, both of them are based on existing technology. The first uses the extensive mobile phone network, along with GPRS data transfer technology, to get the web onto phones, and the second uses the standard wired internet access technology and sticks wireless broadcasters on the end.

The mobile phone camp has the advantage that the mobile phone network already covers something like 95-99% of populated areas (that's a guess, but it's probably not far wrong), and has the secondary advantage that if you're the type of person who wants to browse the internet on the move, it's a near certainty that you already have a mobile. Apple and O2 have grabbed this opportunity with both hands, and are flogging the iPhone to customers on its Internet capabilities like there's no tomorrow.

However, there are disadvantages too, the main one being that mobile Internet access is still slow (GPRS just can't compare to ADSL or cable) and expensive. Let's not forget either that the screen size to which mobile users are accustomed was designed for showing phone numbers, not websites, and manufacturers are having a hard time cramming an entire web page into a screen and keeping the phone a reasonable size.

This is where the "extended wired access" camp can score highly. Wi-fi is now an accepted technological standard, to the extent that almost all laptops now come with it by default, and it works so fast that the limiting factor in the connection speed will almost always be at the service provider's end, not the device. It's also not restricted to any one type of device, so desktops, laptops and ultra-mobile devices can all use it (and talk to each other) equally well. Its disadvantage is that it's primarily been sold as a home or office technology, rather than for public places, so if you can pick up a wireless signal in the street or in a train station, it will either be very weak, or it will be...

...oh dear...

...a subscription service. There's a couple of these, notably The Cloud and BT Openzone. They show up on a wireless device as an unsecured wireless network, but if you connect to them they will deliver nothing except a "please pay us money" splash page until you pay inordinately expensive rates. (£4.50 for an hour? What is this, 1995?) Now, if I were using the internet for business purposes on the move, I can see that this might be a good deal. For the casual user, though, it's a horrifically bad deal, and you're much better off just wandering around until you can find someone who's left their network unlocked so you can nick access off them.

The way around this, I reckon, is for these service providers to recognise that when people are accessing the web on the move, for the most part they only want it for a few minutes. Maybe they're in a pub and want to identify the singer currently warbling on the sound system, or they're in a train station trying to get to the National Rail website, or they've just thought of a hilariously witty comment to post on their blog which they will definitely forget by the time they reach a net-connected computer. (And yes, all three of these situations have happened to me within the last few weeks. Apart from the whole "hilariously witty" thing.) They certainly don't want to pay for an entire hour – anything that will take that long can almost certainly wait until they get home.

This means that the way to get massive public uptake of public wireless access is, quite simply, to drop the prices for intermittent access incredibly low or even free. There should be a way to buy longer-term access (perhaps on a subscription basis), for people who actually need to use the web for hours when on the move), and this could come with other benefits such as higher speeds or prioritised traffic.

(Quick note - no, that doesn't violate Net Neutrality, because it gives priority to users, not websites. The network in this case doesn't care what you're looking at, only how you're looking at it.)

If that's how it should happen, will it? Basically, no. BT and others have sunk a lot of money into their infrastructure, and they're going to want to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, even if it doesn't build up future markets as fast as it could. The problem is the one that I touched on above – the underlying internet infrastructure hasn't changed much, so there's a lot invested in it, and the change that would be required to easily provide widely available public net access (like Wi-MAX) is slow, expensive and riskier than just using the current technology.

There is a bright side, and it's the fact I pointed out right up at the top of this piece: technology develops ridiculously fast. Pretty much every prediction made about how technology is going to develop has turned out to be wrong in some way, so it really wouldn't surprise me if some ingenious entrepreneur suddenly changed the face of wireless internet in much the same way that Freeserve did for dialup ten years ago. We can but hope.

Type the rest of your post here.