Aug. 30--On a couch at Panera Bread, Ellen Davis and her daughter Claire, 17, stared at a laptop, looking up information on a college class that Claire wants to audit.

Free Wi-Fi -- a wireless Internet connection for people using laptops, netbooks and other portable Web-browsing devices -- is a big draw for the Davises.

"We do not have Internet at home," Ellen Davis said. "We decided to let our children grow up with books instead of TV or the Internet."

Claire is a high-school senior at Salem Baptist. She is used to not having the Internet at home. But when they need access they visit businesses with Wi-Fi "hot spots," such as the Panera Bread on Cloverdale Avenue.

"I think it's great," Ellen Davis said of the free Wi-Fi. "It draws people to the business."

We're living in a wireless world, and Winston-Salem was an early city to recognize it.

"The number of gadgets that are able to connect to Wi-Fi hot spots has grown incredibly," said Ananda Mitra, a communications professor at Wake Forest University who studies new technologies and the way they change peoples' lives. "It's not just people with computers; many of the smartphones now have this capability.... Clearly, it is an advantage for people on the move."

Having access to Wi-Fi, he said, "is more and more of a convenience issue. There's a term we use in our research, 'ubiquity of technology.' Electricity is a classic example. You only notice it when you don't have access to it. And Wi-Fi is starting to be like electricity in that sense."

As more people use Wi-Fi, free access has become increasingly common. "There's a certain business advantage in providing it for free," Mitra said. For example, suppose there are two otherwise-identical coffee shops sitting side by side, one with free Wi-Fi and the other with either no Wi-Fi or charging money for people to connect. "The one that is offering it for free will have a higher clientele," Mitra said.

In the past few years, free Wi-Fi can be found not only in coffee shops but at restaurants, bookstores and other businesses -- including some airports, such as Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where Mitra was waiting for a plane while being interviewed and sending further information through his laptop.

For the past six years in Winston-Salem, people have been able to access Wi-Fi using the city's "Wi-Fi on Fourth" -- available from Poplar to Main streets. And many businesses in that stretch and elsewhere offer their own free Wi-Fi.

B.J. Frentzel, the director of operations at Brew Nerds on Fourth Street, said that Wi-Fi is "almost like an expectation" for coffee shops.

"We're going for the plugged-in crowd," he said. "We want to be a place where people can hang out."

"It is a selling tool," said Gena Knighten, the manager of Chelsee's Coffee Shop on Trade Street. "It's a way to get people in. Nowadays, people all but expect it -- especially the younger crowd."

Brett Hunter, a videographer who lives in downtown Winston-Salem, is one of the regulars at such shops as Brew Nerds and Krankies Coffee. He's gotten good at finding the hottest Wi-Fi spots.

"I don't like working at home, so a coffee shop can be like an office," he said as he sat behind his laptop at Brew Nerds. Providing convenient Wi-Fi, he said, "is one of the smartest ways a place can attract a crowd and hold a crowd."

He drifts between various coffee shops, such as Brew Nerds, Krankies and Sands Coffee, and restaurants as he connects to the Web. He buys coffee and snacks along the way. "It's nice to be a patron of all of them," he said.

Know the business's rules

When you are searching for a Wi-Fi location, it's important to know what the rules are.