How cable companies have quietly dominated public Wi-Fi

Next time you pack your beach bag, make sure you pack your laptop and tablet along with your sunblock and trashy novel. Cable Wi-Fi service might soon be available at a seashore near you. Surfing the Web while watching the waves? Sounds funny, but it's already possible in many places along the Jersey Shore, and at Santa Monica Beach and Manhattan Beach in Southern California.

Even more surprising than the availability of Wi-Fi at the beach is the provider: More likely than not, it's a cable company, pursuing an aggressive policy among US cable providers of bringing Wi-Fi services to just about every place their coax cables run. With more than 200,000 Wi-Fi hotspots launched in the past few years, big US cable providers are the runaway leaders in providing public Wi-Fi, already eclipsing traditional providers such as big cellular carriers and coffee shop chains. Though the explosion in cable Wi-Fi hotspots is unlikely to challenge the cellular networks' overall mobile supremacy anytime soon, the growing availability of fast, sometimes free Internet access will likely have some positive benefits for many consumers. In particular, it may enable them to save money by jumping off the cellular network and onto free Wi-Fi more often, resulting in lower data bills. Or they could skip buying a data plan for devices like tablets altogether, and instead rely solely on Wi-Fi. From a market standpoint, what's most interesting is the way the biggest cable companies -- which don't compete against each other, owing to their regional distribution -- have banded together to make their Wi-Fi deployments even more appealing to customers who might otherwise turn to cellular for mobile data needs.