Cometa Networks, the company formed by Intel, IBM and AT&T to dominate the Wi-Fi access business, has gone belly-up. (Image from Intel.)

This, to me, is very good news indeed.

The fact is 802.11, like blogging, has no viable business model. Just offering access for a fee is not going to work. To be useful access has to do something, it has to provide a real service.

Coffee shops offer this access, for the price of a cup (and maybe a roll on the side). But there are many, many other ways to get value from that access. You can create services, within a shop, which use that access for useful work. (I'm not going to tell you what those things are because I haven't totally figured them out myself.)

The bottom line is 802.11 is not a network business, and it's not an access business. It's not about wide-area networking at all, really. It's about local networking.

It's putting the Internet in the air, and making of it a platform on which you can build new applications, applications that depend on data you create unconsciously in your own life, the beating of your heart, the moisture level of your lawn, the expiration date of your yogurt.

It's not a WAN. It's not a network. It's a LAN, it's a platform.

Once the platform is in place, once the applications are set, then we can worry about extending them into the world. Then the way ahead will be obvious. Until then, drink your coffee.

When will they ever learn to stop wasting their money? When they read this blog.