Wireless Home Networking - Index of

The folks at Wi-Fi Planet (one of our favorite sources of industry news) run
the Web site Wi-FiHotSpotList.com (www.wi-fihotspotlist.com), which lets
you search through its huge worldwide database of hot spots. You can
search by city, state, or country. Wi-FiHotSpotList.com includes both free
and for-pay hot spots, so it’s a comprehensive list.
Another great site is JiWire (www.jiwire.com). This site includes a comprehensive
listing of free and for-pay hot spots, a great Wi-Fi news site (Wi-Fi
Net News), and even special software you can download to help you locate
hot spots without being online (just enter the address and you can search
a locally stored database on your PC).
You have much more luck finding freenets and free public access points in
urban areas. The nature of 802.11 technologies is such that most off-the-shelf
access points reach a few hundred feet with any kind of throughput. So, when
you get out of the city and into the suburbs and rural areas, chances are that
an access point in someone’s house won’t reach any place you’re going to
be — unless that house is right next door to a park or other public space.
There’s just a density issue to overcome. In a city, where numerous access
points may be on a single block, you have much better luck getting online.
Although these lists are good, none of them is truly comprehensive because
many individuals who have open hot spots haven’t submitted them. If you’re
looking for a hot spot and haven’t found it through one of these Web sites (or
one of the many, many others online), try using one of the hot spot–finding
programs we discuss in the upcoming section “Tools for Finding Hot Spots.”
Some of the hot spots you find by using these tools, or some of the online
Web pages that collect the reports of people using these tools, are indeed
open, albeit unintentionally. We don’t get involved in a discussion of the
morality or ethics of using these access points to get online. We would say,
however, that some people think that locating and using an open access
point is a bad thing, akin to stealing. So, if you’re going to hop on someone’s
access point and you don’t know for sure that you’re meant to do that, you’re
on your own.
For-pay services
Chapter 16: Going Wireless Away from Home
Although we think that freenets are an awesome concept, if you have an
essential business document to e-mail or a PowerPoint presentation that you
absolutely have to download from the company server before you get to
your meeting, you may not want to rely solely on the generosity of strangers.
You may even be willing to pay to get a good, reliable, secure connection to
the Internet for these business (or important personal) purposes.
Trust us: Someone out there is thinking about how he can help you with that
need. In fact, a bunch of companies are focusing on exactly that business.
It’s the nature of capitalism, right? The concluding sections of this chapter
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