Coupons from on high

By G.F. | SEATTLE

JEFF THOMPSON plays the long game. He is the boss of Towerstream, a firm founded in 1999 to provide high-speed wireless internet service to businesses through line-of-sight connections. Gear is placed atop tall buildings and skyscrapers, such as New York's Empire State Building, and bits zap directly to antennas on subscribers' roofs at speeds up to 1,500 megabits per second (Mbps). Towerstream and others like it let internet users dispense with fixed lines of all sorts, which have to be leased for a fee from a telecoms firm on top of the charge for internet service that runs over them. They offer to have connections up and running in days rather than months. And they are less pricey than wired networks, especially for faster connections.

Now Mr Thompson is bringing innovation to the Wi-Fi market, too. From 2004 to 2008 cities around America convinced telecoms, start-ups and internet service providers to build city-wide Wi-Fi networks. These proved a disaster, partly because mobile devices were incapable of taking full advantage of such networks. So Mr Thompson is taking a different tack. He spent four years quietly signing up locations ideal for Wi-Fi access points across Manhattan. In January Towerstream flipped on a honeycombed arrangement of 1,000 Wi-Fi hot spots across an 18 square kilometre (seven square mile) patch in the heart of New York. The remarkably dense network was designed to provide extremely high speeds and capacity.