No network cable has ever touched my Macbook. It's wireless or nothing, folks. In fact, my house has been completely wireless for almost a decade.

It's a different story if you walk few hundred feet down the road, though. No wireless connection of any kind. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Judging by all of the Web productivity tools (and time wasters) bursting out of Silicon Valley, you would think that Wi-Fi is everywhere. Just open your laptop and you're ready to use them. That may be the case in San Francisco and New York, but on Main Street USA it's a completely different story. Many towns have spotty and expensive wireless coverage, if they have it at all.

The Starbucks I'm sitting in right now has Wi-Fi available from two providers, from $5 per hour to $30 per month. Subscribing is pointless unless I plan to keep spending time at Starbucks because the coverage area isn't that good. If it covered the entire city I might consider it. ISPs don't seem to be rushing to put municipal wireless networks in place, except in piecemeal chunks that aren't all that usable.

Whatever happened to the dream of ubiquitous Wi-Fi?

A few years ago cities were announcing municipal wireless projects left and right, with cities like Philadelphia announcing a plan in 2004 to provide city-wide coverage. But just last month Earthlink, operator of the Philadephia system, announced that it was getting out of the business after continuing losses.

The top ten municipal wireless systems, ranked by wireless analysts Novarum, hardly suggest any sort of nationwide coverage. Five on the list are in California. And the biggest cities are conspicuous by their absence. Why? Because building a city-wide Wi-Fi network is expensive, as much as $150,000 per square mile over five years. And spending taxpayer dollars on what many consider to be a fringe service with little ROI is generally frowned upon. Even when users are charged for the service it can be difficult to recover costs, especially when competing against traditional entrenched operators whose networks are already paid for.

The municipal Wi-Fi service ranked number one by Novarum -- in St. Cloud, Florida – is a case in point. Even after the city spent over $2 million to offer service to its 28,000 residents, the service has had problems with weak signals and dead spots, though more than two-thirds of households have signed up.

There are also other available technologies such as WiMax with a range of up to 30 miles, and new technology from Intel that extends the range of Wi-Fi routers up to 60 miles but these have yet to be deployed on any large scale. One early WiMax rollout has experienced significant problems, according to its Australian operator.

So will larger cities ever see citywide Wi-Fi networks? A company named Meraki thinks so, and plans to create a San Francisco ad-supported network by the end of 2008. In contrast with the typical model of Wi-Fi routers on street lights, Meraki is using solar-powered distribution points on city and asking residents to host repeaters in their homes.

That's pretty much the same approach FON has chosen. The FON router provides a private connection for users who host it, and a public one that interacts with other FON routers to create a sort of mesh-like wireless network.