By Kelly Morgan,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Simones Hot Dog Stand has added something unexpected to the menu: free wireless service for customers with enabled laptops, cell phones or Palm Pilots and BlackBerries.

“Downtown Lewiston is getting wired,” announced an excited Jimmy Simones on Thursday. His son, George Simones, worked with Oxford Networks to set up the service, which has been available for about two weeks.

“A lot of your bigger cities – even Portland and some shops in Freeport – you go down and they’ve got your wireless cafes and places where you can get an Internet signal,” the younger Simones said as he dished up hot soup and helpings of fries from behind the counter at lunchtime. “So we kind of decided to take that step.”

While some people may be used to sipping lattes when e-mailing or surfing the Web, others feel the hot dog stand is a natural spot to offer wireless service.

“This is a political hot spot,” said Mark Seeger, who has spent mornings at Simones working with colleagues on a Senate campaign. He’s been able to keep track of political news on sites such as asmainegoes.com while strategizing.

Shane Henning, a friend of George Simones’, spent hours online at the hot dog stand Thursday.

“They have a pretty good transfer rate here, usually,” he said, referring to the speed at which data is transmitted through the wireless connection. “I’ll be back for the restaurant, anyway, but I’ll be back for the wireless as well.”

Henning also is a fan of Cafe Bon Bon on Main Street, which has offered wireless service for more than a year.

“The wireless is working really good,” said the cafe’s owner, Bonnie Loubier. “We get a lot of students from Bates College and businesspeople.”

“It’s pretty cool,” added employee Misty Bowden. “People come in and bring in their PSPs.”

PSPs are Playstation Portables, or small, hand-held gaming systems that also allow users to watch movies, listen to music, manage photos and connect to the Internet wirelessly.

Wireless Internet connections work through wireless access points, which are connected to the Internet and serve as the base for a communications network that can be accessed remotely by computers or other devices with wireless networking cards.