When I brought my cordless phone from Germany in 1996 and thought that I could just use it in my new New York apartment, I quickly realized that I was really not alone here. There was not one conversation that happened to use my frequency, there were several going on at the same time. I mean it was a mess. It sounded like fun for about the first 7 seconds. I then had to get a new phone with a different frequency. New York is just packed with people, they put them into little boxes with doors and sometimes windows and put these boxes next to each other and on top of each other, I mean many, many, many.
Almost the same situation is actually a bit of a blessing today. My cable service just died in the afternoon. The modem is broken, or some other strange thing must have happened. This would mean an interruption of service in almost any other city, I guess. Here in my building there is at times a selection of neighbours who have their WiFi networks open. There is "Donna", "Wireless", some other guy who happens to have turned his point right now, and there is "Linksys" a very reliable DSL connection, maybe not cable, but still very convenient. I will need to call Time Warner, so they can fix my hookup here, just in case "linksys" runs into problems one day and needs a good neighbour with a solid internet connection.