by culi on 7/31/23, 12:34 PM
Today, McDonald's, of all places, is actually the best place to get free wifi that's actually fast. They're quite committed to the goal of wifi in every locale and obviously they're everywhere
Additionally, certain grocery stores like Sprouts will often place the employee break area in the front of the store so customers can also hang out. There's outlets, a microwave, and free wifi. You'll sometimes have to ignore an annoying TV playing the same 4 commercials on a loop
by toastal on 7/31/23, 4:27 AM
I remember that time before I had a smart phone, but while I had a laptop & before there was security concerns to bother password protecting WiFi access points. I used to stop by roadside hotels/motels & whip out the laptop to do any on-the-go research since it was free & I didn’t yet have a taste for coffee (or the money) to want to stop by a café. The other highlight was using SMS/MSS via email & doing $NUMBER@verzion.net or whatever the address was. The SMS rates were high & I was always carrying my laptop & usually could nab open WiFi
somewhere.
--
Other WiFi-related anecdote is my Fujifilm camera (RIP capacitor) chose to do its app communications between camera & smart phone over WiFi. I’m assuming this was a range thing, but it was interesting being in the wilderness & joining a LAN to get remote control.
by Scoundreller on 7/31/23, 5:15 AM
> This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service
That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.
by pests on 7/31/23, 5:39 AM
Is the blog author on here?
I discovered this site a few weeks ago and then spent days reading every post. I found the electronic asset tagging article very interesting and now notice every sensor tower at stores. The one about alarm wiring was also very interesting.
by giovannibonetti on 7/31/23, 1:22 PM
One thing that bothers me about Free Wifi nowadays is traffic shaping. Here in Latin America, it is very common to have internet fast lanes dedicated to WhatsApp, when Telegram is unusable in the same connection. I notice sometimes I'm connected to a public wifi and Telegram stops working, then if I disconnect and go back to the mobile carrier it suddenly is back and alive.
by blfr on 7/31/23, 8:22 AM
it seems that it has actually become less common for cafes to offer WiFi againIn touristy places wifi is usually available in cafes and there's a correlation between the quality of coffee and the quality of the Internet connection. Best tonic espresso I had in Barcelona was in the divine rays of 300 Mbit wifi6.
https://goo.gl/maps/15nse3xEXAhAppQw6
The correlation holds surprisingly well but allowances need to be made for "no laptops" places and Italy.
by RyanShook on 7/31/23, 3:57 AM
Kind of sad how ad-hoc mode was such a a failure. I always imagined how cool it would be to have a huge number of devices all connected to the internet through each other but it was hard enough to just get two devices talking.
by Brajeshwar on 7/31/23, 3:14 AM
These days, would you use any public WiFi? Even on extended travel, I carry a portable router that plugs into the hotel/stay router/port and then use my own Wi-Fi. Yes, I do have VPN/DNS filter/protection etc on the Phone but you have "too many devices" that will pick that up and every one of them will try to connect to that WiFi. Easier to take care of a Laptop but it becomes a hassle/irritant.
For India, Internet over the phone is so cheap (and OK quality) that most people don't care about WiFi outside of their home/office.
Would love to know more how you deal with these situations?
by pluijzer on 7/31/23, 10:04 AM
Reminds me of the time when mobile data was still expensive and I did not have it.
If I needed to chat with somebody and I was not home I would sit in the street waiting to get a few seconds of WiFi from busses would drive past. Worked quite well for sending and receiving messages.
by Brendinooo on 7/31/23, 11:58 AM
A bit of an aside, but one of the biggest perks of having Comcast as my ISP (I don't love this, but it's the only wired choice I have at my house) is that for roughly 60 percent of my public computing, I connect to an "xfinitywifi" router and get good-enough service.
Dunno what kind of tracking and security risks I'm exposing myself to though...
by baumschubser on 7/31/23, 8:04 AM
There was a time (end 2000's?) when multiple popular home wifi router models calculated their default wifi password from their MAC addresses. There where websites doing the calculation for you, if you gave them the router's MAC.
For me, this was the transitory technology between those laughable free (or sometimes even paid) wifis that where just broken and the time when a) hotels etc. had their wifi finally fixed and b) one could resort to cell phone internet.
by whydoineedthis on 7/31/23, 3:54 AM
Go to Vietnam and every business, even the teeny-tiny mom-and-pop restaurants run out of a street facing living room, will offer free wifi. It was truly an amazing experience being able to expect wifi everywhere I went.
And yes, they had passwords and offered secure wifi. You just had to ask for the the password if they didn't already have it displayed somehow. Working remotely, it was glorious.
It put into perspective how much the US's focus on individualization removes the warm feeling of camaraderie.
Edit: I love when I get downvoted with no comment replies. Real gutsy dispute there.
by 1letterunixname on 7/31/23, 4:13 AM
Reminds me of:
1. Google's Public WiFi in Mountain View, CA: never worked. It was a misconfigured mesh network, possibly with a slow backhaul.
2. If you were a starving student, you could get onto the supermarket's slow free WiFi across the street with a long-range, high power 802.11b/g/a card w/ an external directional antenna that looks suspicious on its own.
3. When you were slightly less starving but still "hungry", the main places with fast WiFi were Starbucks with "Google WiFI".
by emmelaich on 7/31/23, 1:11 PM
by zokier on 7/31/23, 7:20 AM
It's funny how I remember that era, but from outsider perspective. Public WiFi was far less impactful thing around me because we had good 3G deployment pretty early on. Some highlights from that era for me were netbooks (remember those?) with builtin wwan, and having multi-SIM subscription so that I could have USB modem, netbook, and phone all connected with single subscription.
by johnwalkr on 7/31/23, 8:39 PM
Over 10 years ago I was flying from a small airport in Ireland (I think). To get code for 30 minutes of wifi, you put 1 euro in an old school gumball machine and received a capsule with a fortune cookie-like piece of paper. To this day I think that as the best experience I've seen for paying for wifi.
It's usually free in airports now, but sometimes limited to 30 minutes. At this point you can simply change your mac address temporarily.
by charles_f on 7/31/23, 3:59 AM
> the 802.11 protocol that underlies WiFi is surprisingly complex and offers various different modes
Yes, but, see: Bluetooth
by komali2 on 8/2/23, 3:17 PM
Scanning and tracking networks sounds like a fun thing, I wonder why I hadn't considered it before. I can't find any app for doing this in Android, does anyone have something like this they know of?
by BnRJ401E29F8Q3v on 7/31/23, 5:24 PM
Finland (Helsinki specifically) did and still does have city-wide free WiFi, that in actuality is likely still the fastest in the world. Is it safe? That's another question, but boy does it work fine.
by QuinnyPig on 7/31/23, 4:17 AM
To pick a nit, “World of Hyatt” launched in 2017.
by albert_e on 7/31/23, 6:17 AM
> attributed to the Better Business Bureau, noted information security experts
is this a humorous reference that I didn't get? BBB?
by Fatnino on 7/31/23, 6:26 PM
I Palo Alto there's a statue of Nikola Tesla that also happens to be a free wifi ap.
by moonbunR on 8/1/23, 12:53 PM
Are they really safe to use them on computers?