What is this "WiFi" of which you speak?

Okay, I get it. Cities are getting wireless data connectivity. Here's CNN.com on the subject. Salient bits:

One of only a handful of cities in the nation to try it, Chaska -- just southwest of Minneapolis -- plans to have most of the city's 15 square miles Wi-Fi operational by the end of October.

"We firmly believe that the Internet is going to be just as much a part of everybody's future as the telephone or electricity is and we want to make sure that everybody has equal access to it," says Bradley Mayer, Chaska's information systems manager. "We wanted to ensure there was some sort of broadband activity that could be affordable by our residents."

Anonymous | October 18, 2004, 1pm PDT

Okay, I get it. Cities are getting wireless data connectivity. Here's CNN.com on the subject. Salient bits:

One of only a handful of cities in the nation to try it, Chaska -- just southwest of Minneapolis -- plans to have most of the city's 15 square miles Wi-Fi operational by the end of October.

"We firmly believe that the Internet is going to be just as much a part of everybody's future as the telephone or electricity is and we want to make sure that everybody has equal access to it," says Bradley Mayer, Chaska's information systems manager. "We wanted to ensure there was some sort of broadband activity that could be affordable by our residents."

The town's going to charge $16/month for access.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to the library and check out the microfiche of newspapers from the first decade of the last century, to see if all of my forebears in the great endeavor I like to call "journalism" wrote equally breathless stories about the advent of the telephone. Sheesh.