Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
Discovering Public Hot Spots
Figure 16-1:
An airport
concourse
is a perfect
location for
a hot spot,
using
several
access
points.
A wide variety of people and organizations have begun to provide hot spot
services, ranging from individuals who have opened up their wireless home
networks for neighbors and strangers to multinational telecommunications
service providers who have built nationwide or worldwide hot spot networks
containing many hundreds of access points. There’s an in-between here,
too. Perhaps the prototypical hot spot operator is the hip (or wannabe hip)
urban cafe with a digital subscriber line and an access point (AP) in the
corner. In Figure 16-1, you can see a sample configuration of APs in an airport
concourse, which is a popular location for hot spots because of travelers’
downtime when waiting for flights (or the everlasting gobstopper that is the
TSA line).
Many hot spots now use 802.11g, though it’s not uncommon to still run
across 802.11b hot spots. As we write, no hot spots that we know of are using
802.11n (though we’re sure a café or two somewhere in the world have
upgraded). The key thing to keep in mind is that if you have an 802.11b, g, or
n network adapter in your laptop or other device, you should be able to connect.
Note: If your laptop or handheld computer has an 802.11a-only network
adapter, you can’t connect to the vast majority of hot spots (we’ve never seen
an 802.11a hot spot). Luckily, most folks who have 802.11a in their laptops
have it in the form of a dual-band 802.11a/b/g network adapter, so they won’t
have problems connecting to an 802.11g hot spot. Head to Chapter 2 for
a refresher on the 802.11 Wi-Fi standards.
Seating
area
Public Access
Points
Seating
area
Seating
area