I spent last week in Texas, dependent on free WiFi hotspots, and I learned a powerful lesson.

There is no such thing as free WiFi.

When "free" WiFi is provided by a bar, coffee shop or restaurant, there is a quid pro quo. You're going to eat. You're going to drink. And when you're no longer eating and/or drinking (and ordering) you're going to get nasty looks until you leave.

There is a cost to a shop's WiFi that goes beyond the cost of the set-up. That is the cost of the real estate, the cost of the table, and the cost to a shop's ambience when a bunch of hosers come in and spend all day staring at laptops.

Now here's an even-more controversial point.

Municipal "free" WiFi ain't free either.

That's because municipal WiFi will, due to its nature, come with political strings attached. We've already seen it in libraries, where politicians have forced filters onto content "to protect the children." What's filtered, and how, is opaque to users, and the pressure to increase the filtering will increase with the Internet's capabilities and with user desires to push those capabilities.

Do we really want to enable trackless hacking, on the government's dime? Are governments going to be enabling fire sharing, and child porn? (Not to mention regular porn?) The political pressures to censor, in some way, perhaps in many ways, will prove irresistible. What is censored, and how, will be different from place-to-place. Which means you won't have Internet access at all, but government run (and controlled) private networks masquerading as Internet access.

Now, will the cellular industry take advantage of all this and finally provide real Internet access in their broadband offerings, rather than controlled-and-monitored private network service?

I don't know.