Tikkabik

Bakery-cafe chain Panera Bread is the latest nationwide company to offer Wi-Fi in its locations. What's cool about this is that Panera is taking an entirely different approach than Starbucks or Borders Books & Music. Panera is offering the service for free. Good for them!

In a press release issued last week announcing the service, the company's chairman and CEO said that Panera doesn't believe that Wi-Fi should cost customers extra, but sees it simply as an "extra amenity" that his company wants to offer an increasingly "sophisticated and diverse consumer base."

Panera plans to have about 130 locations on board by the end of the year, and already maintains a list of locations with the service (URL above). They say that the number could get to 1,000 once they've got franchisees and so on board.

This mirrors comments from Newburyopen.net maker Tech Superpowers' CEO, Michael Oh, who recently told the Boston Globe that he sees Wi-Fi like air conditioning: It should be a basic service that consumers in certain retail markets should expect without paying extra for. Right now he's talking with the City of Somerville, Mass. about setting up Davis Square as an "urban hot zone."

And really, if a vendor is already paying for access themselves either through a business ISDN line or a T1 or whatever, the cost of setting up wireless access is chump-change: A couple of hundred for an industrial-grade Wi-Fi router and a couple of hours of consulting time for a network security person, if necessary. Oh and his group will even give you the specs for how to set up an urban hot zone yourself, if you want -- they've done it on Newbury Street in Boston.

Now if we can just get the telcos and ISPs on board with the idea of making commercial access cheap enough to be ubiquitous...