Yet my local coffee shop has no such problem.  Perhaps they have more
clue?  Ya think?  It's actually trivially easy to cut off squatters.
(See the Wiki below.)  So anyone who says that's a real problem is ...
well ... clueless.

They're probably not doing all that well as coffee shops either.

But it's not just the WiFi squatters. There are tons of teens today
squatting at coffee shops all over. Coffee shops are now meeting places for
teens on lunch break, college students doing their homework, and on bored
Saturdays. There are tons of squatters. These young people used to sit like
this in Burger King and McDonalds, now they sit in coffee shops. Some of
them have computers (unlike the "olden days") and some of them do not. I
guess the point I wanted to make is that squatters in fast food places and
coffee shops will always be a problem. WiFi or not. I doubt you'll see WiFi
practices significantly change. You'll just see managers starting to require
a purchase if they want to "get rid" of you. They've been doing this for
years.

-Frank

Thats the case with my friends wifes' place. She has a coffee shop and
added free wireless when it becamae popular. It seems people have an
entitlement mentality that the Internet should be free or whatever and
she found that many of the freeloaders wouldn't even make a minimal
purchase and just tie up a table for hours. She also had to turn off the
wireless during busy hours to free up the tables for paying customers.

You were referring to.

You apparently don't, so I guess that says it all.

And here's real-life use of such a technique (if I understand correctly),
proven and even applied to 3G:

    Gerard J. Foschini, a 40-year veteran of Bell Labs, came up with the
    theory behind Blast about a decade ago while working on a long-term
    project to find the limits of a wide variety of technologies. As part of
    that project, he reviewed the work of Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs
    mathematician who published a paper in 1948 that established the field of
    modern information theory. Dr. Shannon's work still provides the basis
    for much information theory, including the notion of system capacity
    limits.

    ''He found the ultimate limits,'' Dr. Foschini said. ''But he was
    basically dealing with one transmitter and one receiver. It was obvious
    to us that we could deal with many transmitting antennas and many
    receiving antennas for the same transmission.''

    So Dr. Foschini began developing mathematical models to see whether
    sending data through arrays of antennas would expand network capacities.

    Antenna arrays have long been used in radar systems. But Dr. Foschini
    said that radar arrays are used to focus radio beams, whereas he wanted
    to scatter them. He hoped to discover whether wireless capacity could be
    boosted by dividing up data in space as well as time. Rather than
    point-to-point communications, his plan was to create volume-to-volume
    exchanges.

    He had found through mathematical research that the concept would not
    work if the transmitter had only a single antenna. ''If you send the same
    signal from one antenna many times all radiating in the same band, you
    come out statistically right where you started,'' Dr. Foschini said.

    Instead, he developed a system that divided data into multiple streams
    that were then transmitted on the same frequency by several antennas. At
    the receiving end, the different streams of data were picked up by other
    antenna arrays.

    Normally more than one transmission on a single radio frequency produces
    nothing but electronic noise. But Blast can make sense out of the noise
    because of the physical separation of the antennas sending the messages.
    Processing software reassembles the scattered data streams into their
    original form.

    When Dr. Foschini tested the plan mathematically, the results were
    surprising. ''We found the capacities were enormous -- far, far in excess
    of what people were thinking of,'' he said. ''If you put more and more
    antennas at the transmitting end, the capacity kept increasing. We were
    coming out with such ridiculously large capacities that at first, we
    didn't believe it.''

    Prototype systems proved that the experiments were correct. Each
    additional antenna added another element of space and because of that,
    additional capacity.

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C03EFD61131F935A257
52C0A9659C8B63

[top posting fixed]

Depends on what you mean by "better."  ;)

All technologies involve tradeoffs, and "CDMA" is no exception, with
issues of pilot pollution, cell "breathing," and other forms of call
degradation under high load.

Strictly from an efficiency standpoint, as measured in Erlangs, "CDMA"
and GSM aren't that far apart.  Some time ago, Chris Pearson, Executive
Vice President, 3G Americas, wrote:

  Many CDMA operators are currently in the midst of deploying 1XRTT,
  an interim step towards 3G that promises to use spectrum more
  efficiently. Time will tell whether that is the truth but the fact is
  that, based on best-case data from CDMA vendors, 1XRTT with EVRC
  handles up to 156 Erlangs per sector. Bearing in mind that GSM with
  AMR handles 142 Erlangs, it is a great stretch to argue that 1XRTT
  has a major advantage over GSM. GSM operators also can deploy dynamic
  frequency and channel allocation (DFCA), which assigns calls to
  channels based on conditions such as signal and interference. With
  AMR and DFCA, GSM can handle 170 Erlangs per sector - an improvement
  on 1XRTT’s 156.

  In the near future, 1XRTT operators will probably be able to deploy a
  technology called selective mode vocoder (SMV), which could provide
  20% more capacity over EVRC. The catch is that SMV-like methods can
  be applied to GSM to produce almost identical capacity gains. Thus,
  while one technology may have slightly higher capacity gains at one
  point in time, another technology is always preparing to leap-frog
  over it.

In addition, as I've noted in the past:

  Unlike a TDMA/GSM network, a CDMA network is interference-limited
  rather than bandwidth-limited, and the Erlang capacity is calculated
  according to the probability of blocking by the network, i.e., the
  probability that a new mobile is denied access to the network.

  The problem is that CDMA Erlang numbers don't take into account the
  quality/usability of the call.  CDMA networks can be loaded to the
  point where quality is truly horrible, whereas TDMA/GSM networks
  guarantee bandwidth to every call.  Real world RF interference
  further muddies the water.

  The result is that claimed Erlangs (call capacity metrics) for CDMA
  networks tend to be unrealistic (some would say wildly unrealistic);
  i.e., they are not directly comparable to the capacity of GSM
  networks. When CDMA calls are limited to those with quality
  comparable to GSM, then capacity is roughly comparable.

  Contrary to the claims of CDMA boosters, there is no magic.(c)

That said, the whole debate about "better" is mostly meaningless and
pointless from a customer point of view -- "CDMA" and GSM are both
capable of very good results in real-world deployments, which is all
that really matters to customers.

This is true, see "http://www.cellphoneinfo.com/index.html"

"CDMA has the best noise immunity, is the least susceptible to multipath
(fading), and can talk to more than one cell at a time so that
cell-to-cell handovers (a critical cause of dropped calls) are a soft
exchange and not a hard switch."

and
"http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/channels/wireless/training/mobilewirelesstoday4.html"

"Advantages of CDMA technology include high user capacity and immunity
from interference by other signals."

Well....I really am curious what John Vavas' definition of "cellular
technology" is and if he thinks its referring to companies like
Cingular, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile.

It actually ended on February 12, 2005. While it's great for the people
that have it, it's no longer available, and it's not helpful for people
to talk about it as if it's still available, and could, if people try to
use MediaNet in the same way, lead to some big surprises on their bills.

Fortunately, Navas's credibility is such that no one is any more likely
to believe him about $20/month unlimited data, than they are about
anything else.

Cingular is under no obligation to continue providing MediaWorks at $20
per month forever. They have, in the past, not hesitated to take people
off older plans, and move them to newer plans.

In a perverse way. Everyone would much rather have him stop posting
misinformation.

As I've pointed out before, the risk is only $40, the difference between
MEdia Net Unlimited and Data Connect Unlimited.

We have different standards for what constitutes *real* "evidence."

Internet legends, remember?

Many (most?) anecdotal horror stories are substantially wrong.

It's worse than that!  Yes, Sprint chose to block tethering when
possible, and then you just couldnt' do it without the right plan.  With
Cingular, they just CHARGE YOU, by the kilobyte, and then you get
sticker shock on your next bill.  So posting this drivel is even more
damaging for cingular users.

It works, but the caveat is clearly stated.

I don't think it's inevitable.

That would be a poor choice.

I personally think unlimited data for no more than $20/month is here to
stay, but only time will tell.

In alt.cellular.cingular John Navas <spamfilter0@navasgroup.com> wrote:

No, it doesn't.  It mentions the assumption that the teenager was at
fault, but the charges were on "Mom's" phone.