Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
� Cell phone companies are getting into the hot spot business. Led by
T-Mobile (which has hot spots in almost every Starbucks coffee shop),
cell phone companies are beginning to buy into the hot spot concept by
setting up widespread networks of hot spots in their cellular phone territories.
Although these networks aren’t yet ubiquitous — the coverage
isn’t anywhere close to that of the cellular phone networks yet — they’re
getting better by the day.
Besides improving coverage and solving the roaming problem, commercial
hot spot providers are beginning to look at solutions that provide a higher
grade of access — offering business class hot spot services, in other words.
For example, they’re exploring special hot spot access points and related
gear that can offer different tiers of speeds (you could pay more to get a
faster connection) or that can offer secure connections to corporate
networks (so that you can safely log on to the office network to get files).
In the following section, we talk about some of the most prominent commercial
hot spot providers operating in the United States. We don’t spend any
time talking about the smaller local hot spot providers out there, although
many of them are hooking up with companies like Boingo. We’re not down
on these smaller providers, but we’re aiming for the maximum bang for our
writing buck. If you have a local favorite that meets your needs, go for it!
Understanding metro Wi-Fi
A final category of Wi-Fi hot spot is the metro-wide hot spot (or hot zone) that
a number of cities have begun to launch. Cities as big as Philadelphia and San
Francisco and as small as Addison, Texas (population, 14,166), have or are
building metro Wi-Fi hot zones. (We’re sure that even smaller towns are doing
the same thing, but are flying beneath the press radar!)
A metro-wide hot spot is a city-wide network of access points connected back
to a broadband Internet connection. This network can be built for any
number of reasons, including:
� As a network for the city/metro area government and public services,
providing Internet access on the go for police, fire, public works, and
other officials
� As a means of providing broadband access to residents in their homes
(most common in areas where other broadband services are not widely
available)
� As a public amenity to all (residents, visitors, and the like) for outdoor
access to the Internet
� Finally, and most commonly, some combination of the preceding