Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 16
Going Wireless Away from Home
In This Chapter
� Discovering public hot spots
� Using hot spots from T-Mobile, Wayport, and Boingo
� Tools of the hot spot trade
� Staying secure
� Connecting wirelessly on the road
� Checking out what’s coming soon
Throughout this third edition of Wireless Home Networking For Dummies,
we focus (no big surprise here) on wireless networks in your home. But
wireless networks aren’t just for the house. For example, many businesses
have adopted wireless networking technologies to provide network connections
for workers roaming throughout offices, conference rooms, and factory
floors. Just about every big university has built a campuswide wireless
network that enables students, faculty, and staff members to connect to the
campus network (and the Internet) from just about every nook and cranny on
campus. Entire cities are beginning to go “unwired,” by setting up metropolitan
Wi-Fi networks that provide free or cheap wireless access to residents,
workers, and visitors.
These networks are useful if you happen to work or teach or study at a business
or school that has a wireless network. But you don’t need to be in one of
these locations to take advantage and get online wirelessly. You can find tens
of thousands of hot spots (places where you can log on to publicly available
Wi-Fi networks) across the United States (and the world, for that matter).
In this chapter, we give you some background on public hot spots, and we
discuss the various types of free and for-pay networks out there. We also
talk about tools you can use to find a hot spot when you’re out of the house.
Finally, we talk in some detail about some of the bigger for-pay hot spot
providers out there and how you can get on their networks. The key thing to
remember about hot spots — the really cool part — is that they use 802.11
wireless networking equipment. In other words, they use the same kind of
equipment you use in your wireless home network, so you can take basically
any wireless device in your home (as long as it’s portable enough to lug
around) and use it to connect to a wireless hot spot.