Not only can you talk on your RAZR on the lifts but now you can surf....

Below is from the Vail Daily News. I guess its harmless to positive...but stuff like this just encourages the wrong kind of people to move to the mountains. Part of the whole reason so many people enjoy the ski life is the opportunity to get away from the electronic tethers that hold us in thrall. A little time away from email, cell phones, wireless laptops, Blackberries, and....even this this blog (sacre bleu!) are not going to hurt anyone.
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Vail plans for wireless internet

BY NIC CORBETT: Eagle County correspondentJuly 24, 2006

VAIL - Installing a wireless Internet network may put a ski resort on the map, but Vail Town Council members want to make sure the unsightly "nodes" don't interfere with the improvements to Vail Village. Communications provider CenturyTel plans to install 84 nodes - cylindrical metal objects nearly 3 feet tall and 1 foot in diameter - to operate a townwide public-access wireless Internet network in Vail. In the proposal, CenturyTel had planned to put 18 of those nodes on Vail Villages's lampposts, which are worth more than $2,000 apiece. But at last Tuesday's Town Council meeting, council members told the company to find an alternative and even suggested camouflaging the nodes as fire hydrants or hiding them behind foliage. "If it has to stay on a lamppost, I foresee a problem," said Councilman Farrow Hitt.Bob Stone, from CenturyTel, said the nodes will instead be placed on other city-owned property, such as bridges, restrooms and parking structures.Before the contract between CenturyTel and the town gets signed, the revised map of the nodes' placement will go before Vail's Design and Review Board on Aug. 1 for approval. If the contract does get signed, which both parties say they expect, guests and Vail residents will have access to wireless Internet for an hour at a time at 300 kilobits per second by November, in time for the start of the ski season. "You can sign up for one-hour increments, and at the end of the hour, you have to register for more time," Stone said. "Hypothetically, you could register 24 times a day."There are no restrictions on the number of people on the network at a given time, said Ron Braden, the information technology manager for Vail. "We've got plenty of bandwidth, so we don't anticipate that being a problem," he said.There will also be a private network for city employees and another network on a separate frequency for emergency services, both at 200 megabits per second."It gives us another communication method for (police) in-car video for pushing video back to the dispatch center," Braden said. The current technology Vail public safety officers use through Sprint is only 700 kilobits, Braden said.CenturyTel is considering expanding the emergency services network to the Interstate 70 corridor."It's something that we're planning on adding that we've figured into our plan, but it's not in our contract," Stone said.