May I pour you a glass of wifi while we wait for the appetizers?

Do you know what a MAC address is? Me neither. But until today my home wifi network was configured to filter for it. Basically, this meant that a mere password wouldn’t grant you access to the network. A password was required, yes, but that alone was not sufficient.

Laptop, desktop, Blackberry, visiting iPhone — without providing your MAC address you weren’t getting onto our network. And if you did cough up the digits we had to take the time to add it to the list of allowed addresses on our router.

Yesterday we bought an Airport Express and when setup proved to be more smug than plug-and-play we ditched MAC filtering, just to see. That did it. Music started flowing and we haven’t turned MAC filtering back on, leaving our network open to anyone who can input the password. And I’m so glad.

When I bought the Airport I wasn’t just buying a wireless access point. I was buying a party where the music sounds evenly awesome throughout the house. That was the image I had in mind: it was our housewarming from January, except instead of me struggling to patch my PC into the stereo I had music running throughout the house and it was easy I was happy.

When we have people over we want them to be happy, and as good hosts we want to offer them all that they’re comfortable accepting. What kind of a host would I be if, when they picked up their wireless device to show me the latest app I’ve asked them about or to google a point of trivia under debate, I required them to use precious megabytes from their 3G data plan when I’ve got a perfectly good wifi network that’s always on? Naturally, the thing to do would be to offer the network password alongside hors d’oeuvres and a glass of wine.

But with MAC filtering engaged it was like we were ready to accommodate any request as long as it was accompanied by a detailed recipe and permitted time for procurement and preparation.

Choices about devices and how you configure them aren’t just about personal use anymore. As our devices travel longer distances with us in our pockets, representing increasing value as software upgrades keep their functionality growing, we’re going to need to think about how to make them play nice when they meet other devices in other pockets. Which means first establishing a baseline for “nice”.

Is it possible that if we had guests over tomorrow and didn’t offer them free wifi we’d be regarded as stand-offish people? Probably not, but that’s how I’d feel looking across the dining room table at a person I’ve defined in practical terms as both friend and threat to network security. And maybe that would translate into some gesture or remark my wife or I would make (probably me), and maybe in the end I would come off as aloof.

So we’re open. Irreversibly. Which is how these things go, isn’t it?