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Many of us at UCLA spend a lot of time in Starbucks drinking coffee or tea and talking. There’s also the occasional guy/girl with his/her Mac or ultra portable computer sitting beside his/her nonfat grande latte.

T-mobile has noticed this and is creating “HotSpots” all around the nation. HotSpots provide T1 wireless Internet access to paying T-mobile customers. Airports and Borders Bookstores have also jumped on the Hot bandwagon.

The only downside to this very tempting deal is the not-so-hot $39.99 monthly fee (and this is with a promotional $10 discount). If I spent every day in a Starbucks or spent a lot of time in airports, the fee might be justified, but a mere college student is not going to spend 40 bucks a month for wireless T1 access.

There are other options, however: $29.99 gets you unlimited local access as opposed to the $49.99 unlimited nationwide fee. Also, you can buy refillable access cards, $20 for 120 nationwide minutes or $50 for 300 nationwide minutes.  Finally, you can opt for a pay-as-you-go system for a $2.99 initial fee and 25 cents/min rate. The price is still a bit steep for me, but it should eventually go down.

Also, I would be afraid to whip out my laptop and sign on to Kazaa at Starbucks because the “unlimited” access only allows for 500 megabytes of transfer, with a charge of 25 cents added for each additional megabyte. It would be easy to exceed that rate if you were, say, streaming music videos off of Launch.com while downloading movies from Kazaa. 

Finally, before you take out your credit card, make sure your laptop has a Wi-Fi 802.11b card installed. This is the wireless technology that allows your laptop to receive high speed Internet. Despite claims by T-Mobile that their service is secure, just as you can listen in on other’s cordless phone conversations, malicious bystanders could spy on the airwaves around your computer, observing your activities or stealing information. 

The only way around this security weakness is to use a virtual private network. In simple terms, a VPN service such as Boingo ($30 per year) creates a safe place to route all of your traffic by insulating your traffic from other network traffic on the Internet. Thirty bucks per year sounds fair for peace of mind. By the way, other traditional options for protection such as software firewalls, which selectively block network traffic, are not an effective alternative to a VPN in wireless cases.

Wireless technology is amazing and very exciting. I enjoyed our wireless network at home during winter break and now I want to have wireless Internet access at UCLA and surrounding areas. It is an addictive new technology. Luckily, UCLA has already instated a wireless access program on campus.

UCLA’s Wireless Consortium Web page states that our proximity to the L.A. media industries and Silicon Valley suited the construction of a wireless network. They also believe that wireless gaming is going to greatly help boost the expansion of our network on campus. 

While UCLA’s network is currently functioning, its use is mostly limited to faculty and physically bounded within select buildings on campus. Problems with “security and scalability” still have to be ironed out before my dream of playing Unreal 2003 and chatting with friends on AIM during class can come true. 

Hopefully, UCLA will become a HotSpot sooner rather than later … and best of all, it will probably be free!   

Esposito’s top three portable entertainment devices are: the Apple iPod, Gameboy Advance, and Samsung SPH-A500 Color Screen mobile phone. E-mail Esposito at resposito@media.ucla.edu.