Free Public WiFi

https://computer.rip/2023-07-29-Free-Public-WiFi.html

by EamonnMR • 3 years ago

371 175 3 years ago

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

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?

ceejayoz2• 3 years ago

I’ve never had issues with four phones and two laptops on Hilton wifi when we travel as a family.

DistractionRect4• 3 years ago

I do something similar, with a router flashed with openwrt. If there's a physical router/ethernet port I can plug into great, if not I run one of the radios in client mode to connect to the wifi.

All traffic is secured with wireguard to my home router, and then goes through my ISP. The wireguard tunnel is wrapped in an error correcting tunnel; it makes a huge difference on the usability a lot of public APs.

Helmut10001• 3 years ago

I think these setups are fantastic. Here [1] I wrote about my IPSEC-setup on a portable private Wifi network based on a Protectli that I connected to someone's Wifi.

[1] https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2021-11-19_pfsense_opnsense_ipsec_c...

bane• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity how do you deal with situations where the public wifi has one of those middle pages that you have to type in or click something (captive portal?) before the access point grants access?

retrobox2• 3 years ago

Can you share more details on the setup of the error correcting tunnel? That sounds very interesting!

muppetman• 3 years ago

Edit: I apologise I see you have answered this below.

What is your error correcting tunnel? Given that Wireguard is UDP and that any tunneled TCP that gets dropped should just be handled by TCP, why encapsulate Wireguard in something else? I certainly find Wireguard itself improves many Public Wifi networks, I've never thought to encapsulate it further.

delta_p_delta_x• 3 years ago

Where I live, most of the mass rapid transit stations are underground, and connection is sometimes spotty. The country has launched a secure public Wi-Fi service. Users on smartphones can authenticate using EAP-SIM[1], or laptop users can use an app developed by the agency to authenticate with WPA2 Enterprise PEAP MSCHAPv2.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Authentication_Prot...

xobs2• 3 years ago

The implementation here is rather annoying, because as soon as you enter the tunnel the wifi cuts off. But there's a 10-15 second latency where network connections just fail as the phone decides the AP is actually gone before it cuts over to LTE.

Then the whole process repeats again once you get to the next station.

Since LTE is usually reliable even in the tunnel, I usually remove the wifi connection. Granted it might help that I don't normally travel during peak hour, so the mobile network is usually fine for my needs.

It's made even more annoying by the fact that "Forgetting" the connection only works until the phone is rebooted, at which point the behaviour returns.

lmm• 3 years ago

These days, would you use any public WiFi?

These days I treat my home network the same as a public network. Too many "smart" devices to be worth trusting, so the devices I care about are locked down the same as they would be if I connected them directly to the internet - and sometimes I do. Frankly I have more trust that I can keep my phone or laptop up to date than any consumer-grade router (do you know which version of linux it's running? How often do you even get updates?)

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

Putting IoT devices on your guest network is a very common home security/privacy thing to do. They very often snoop when they can, and your router shuts that down on the guest network.

bdavbdav2• 3 years ago

Absolutely - Never trust the wire, whatever wire it is.

nine_k3• 3 years ago

Yes, I pretty often use WiFi in airports overseas, because roaming data rates are not fun (or data does not work), and whatever slice of free access the airport WiFi allows is usually enough to check mail and connecting flights, chat a bit over IM, upload a few photos, sometimes even review a PR or push a PR.

Hotel WiFi is usually so-so, even paid, but still much better than 10 years ago.

gumby7• 3 years ago

In India you need a local phone number just to use wifi. I think this is a law

midasuni• 3 years ago

I get free international roaming nowadays, but 5 years ago I was in China and accidentally plugged my phone in to my laptop to charge.

Laptop started syncing something that had been blocked all week (Dropbox maybe), and the SMS flooded in.

The connection was so fast that within a minute or two I got the following message:

From Vodafone: So far you've used 83MB of data today in our Rest of World Zone, and spent £255. It'll cost £15 for each additional 5MB you use. We'll next let you know when you've spent £495 today but, if you'd prefer us not to, please contact your account administrator. Sent OCT 15 @10:45 UK

mulmen• 3 years ago

The network is compromised. Any other assumption is lunacy. This is why we have TLS. Plugging your own WiFi into a hostile network (read: any) does precisely fuckall to improve your security.

ahoka• 3 years ago

You can filter out broadcast, multicast and other kind of link local nastyness. Also a single tunnel obscures traffic if one’s super secretive.

gumby7• 3 years ago

This is the way. Also good for those hotels/conference centers that give you a small number of “allowable” devices — when you have kids with multiple devices, maybe a game console, etc plus maybe an appletv you quickly run out. Instead the router authenticates and that’s that.

I terminate my VPN at one of my own machines mainly for (marginal) security but conveniently this lets me stream the same stuff as home since the services can’t tell the exit is a VPN

Fnoord• 3 years ago

Yes, I would. I use Wireguard client with kill switch. If I don't have a Wireguard connection, nothing works. The only caveat is the Wireguard server runs on my home connection. If down, 'my internet is down'. If slow, 'my internet is slow'. But actually it appears to be pretty reliable. Another downside is all the traffic is tunneled through my home IPv4 and I might not want other people to know such. But that too seems to be an edge case. Against a possibly hostile or hacked WLAN network which I decide to use, it works fine, though I generally use it over mobile (which I've configured to only use LTE / 5G NR, not lower as these are easier to MITM and I don't want a downgrade attack although in theory in such a case, too, Wireguard client w/killswitch would protect).

nunez2• 3 years ago

Yes but I use Tailscale and route through my exit node

whydoineedthis• 3 years ago

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.

TheDong• 3 years ago

The article mentions that sort of "free wifi" (free as in "free with the purchase of a coffee or food"), but seems to be much more about things like Municipal Wifi (Free wifi for anyone in the city), and ad-hoc wifi.

I also miss the period where it seemed like we might get actual city-wide free-wifi meshes in major metropolitan areas, but alas, it is not to be. Cafe wifi does not replace public utilities.

It put into perspective how much the US's focus on individualization removes the warm feeling of camaraderie.

Sorry, what? Large US cities, like SF, basically every cafe has wifi too.

A for-profit business offering wifi doesn't exactly give me a feeling of camaraderie, rather the opposite. Offering wifi is a way to ensure people talk to each other even less.

I assume you're getting downvoted because you're relaying a personal anecdote that isn't all that relevant, and also frankly just comes off as an excuse to make a dig at the US that doesn't really make sense ("Did you know cafes have wifi in vietnam? Doesn't america individualism suck?").

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

Pune, a city in India, experimented with a city-wide WiFi[1] in 2007. I think it didn't work out.

I've heard that in the remote hills/villages of India, there are WiFi routers deployed to connect the people there where phone/cell reception is bad or not available. These WiFi services helps with commerce, especially UPI[2] Payments.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2007/pune-indias-first-wi-fi-city/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

yawnxyz• 3 years ago

In Sydney, most places don't have wifi (including cafes)

proconlon• 3 years ago

Vietnam has a far more self centered culture than the US. The motorbikes and cars will never ever stop for a pedestrian and drivers can and will split lanes and cut people off. People would rather force their way into a crowded elevator than let people off first. Maybe it's just wifi that gives you warm feelings, which I get, but I must be missing the camaraderie.

xarope• 3 years ago

I think you have the wrong idea about how pedestrians cross streets in vietnam. You cross, maintain a straight line and a constant speed, and the vehicles play frogger around you.

Not the other way round.

(only slightly joking here...)

gumby7• 3 years ago

In Germany our neighbor had some network problems (FU Deutsche Telekom) so we just let her use ours, which I believe is illegal.

MaKey• 3 years ago

In Germany it's not illegal to let someone else use your WiFi.

nebalee• 3 years ago

It's not illegal, but you are liable for any wrongdoing done by people using your connection (Störerhaftung), especially with regard to unauthorized filesharing. There was an amendment to the respective law to alleviate this problem and relieve providers of any liability, but the amendment was not phrased clear enough and there's a conflicting ruling from the European Court of Justice. In effect, if you are sued by rightholders for copyright violations committed through your connection, german courts decided, you are still liable unless you identify the perpetrator.

Ayesh• 3 years ago

If they didn't have the password visible, "66668888" or "88888888" usually works.

I truly miss Vietnam.

Exoristos• 3 years ago

It sounds like the American city I live in. Oh, we also have free municipal WiFi.

RyanShook• 3 years ago

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.

callalex• 3 years ago

It’s important to note that the WiFi ad-hoc standard is not a mesh network standard, and was never intended to be one. It is just a simplified standard for an Access Point with an easier to implement feature set.

userbinator• 3 years ago

It's been a while since I've looked at this in detail but I believe ad-hoc mode essentially gives you the equivalent of a wireless Ethernet hub.

benterix• 3 years ago

It was a "failure" in the sense no significant mesh network was ever created because it was against the interest of service providers.

Today we have vastly superior possibilities and yet, apart from some niche efforts like the LoRaWAN, a "free mesh" is still not a thing.

ianburrell• 3 years ago

Ad-hoc mode, also called WiFi Direct, gets used in other services. It is used in AirDrop and Android equivalents.

Hotspot mode destroyed the use of connecting to internet. It is easier for devices to connect to hotspot than setup ad-hoc connection. My impression is that there is assumption that WiFi Direct isn’t routed.

charles_f• 3 years ago

the 802.11 protocol that underlies WiFi is surprisingly complex and offers various different modes

Yes, but, see: Bluetooth

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

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".

QuinnyPig• 3 years ago

To pick a nit, “World of Hyatt” launched in 2017.

toastal2• 3 years ago

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.

JD557• 3 years ago

I had completely forgot about sending MMS via mail! (Not Verizon, but my provider had a similar thing)

If I recall, some times the message would be delayed by quite a while, so it was not a reliable replacement for SMS, but still fun (and would allow me to send data from my PC to my phone).

Thanks for the memories

pests3• 3 years ago

Did you ever get a text on a landline? Startled me the first time - some 90s era robotic voice reading it out.

toastal2• 3 years ago

I did it out of necessity to save money. The delay was real, & I’m surprised dates tolerated it from me.

Later, I only had a minimal data plan (cheaper than with voice+SMS) + Google Voice & some forwarding app. I remember rushing from a Taco Bell $2 meal deal to a friend’s to take a job interview call after an email so I had enough data to actually finish out the interview.

Frugal times.

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

I used it until recently but carrier spam filtering has become so aggressive out of necessity, that message delivery is intermittent to unusable. As usual, spammers have ruined everything and this is why we can't have nice things.

Scoundreller2• 3 years ago

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.

gumby7• 3 years ago

Strangely, in the US at least, the cheap hotels would have free or low cost WiFi while the upscale places charged an arm and a leg.

nine_k3• 3 years ago

Not strangely; it's completely logical. By the same token, a bottle of sparkling water would cost you much more in an expensive restaurant. Those who live in upscale hotels and eat at expensive restaurants are usually much less price-sensitive.

cpeterso• 3 years ago

Price discrimination: people staying at expensive hotels can afford to pay for Wi-Fi or they're on a business trip and will just expense the cost.

albert_e3• 3 years ago

this is probably because bigger hotels are more likely to be booked by business travellers and these expenses get lumped into reimbursements.

smaller hotels need to compete for more discerning budget oriented travellers who will only pay charges seen as reasonable, or start avoiding hotels seen as fleecing.

bboygravity• 3 years ago

Yet, it causes "the pain of paying" and micro-transactions in general go directly against common sense and general marketing ideas of building a luxury/exclusive hassle-free feeling brand.

Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc).

It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.

benbristow• 3 years ago

In the UK it's the other way round.

Our big two 'budget' (haha) hotel chains, Premier Inn and Travelodge both charge for barely usable Wi-Fi. The former offering an unlimited free service but restricted to about 500kbps and a paid 'ultimate' service which runs at about 10mbps. The latter giving you 30 mins free and then you have to pay, unless you're in one of their premium rooms where its included. Total racket supplied by Virgin WiFi for both. Thankfully don't often need it with better 4G/5G signal but sometimes the rooms can be Faraday cages.

Most of the more posh hotels I've been to have free unlimited decent WiFi.

chrismcb• 3 years ago

It was a business thing. Business travelers works get there company to pay for the WiFi. So it was expensive. And it wasn't a US thing. I ran into the same issue in Europe.

thayne2• 3 years ago

My theory is that it is a form of price discrimination. If you can afford to stay at a nicer hotel, then you are more likely to be able and willing to pay more for wifi as well. You can see it in other things too. For example, mid-range hotels often have "free" breakfast included, but higher end hotels charge you for breakfast. Room service prices scale with the price of a room.

jtokoph• 3 years ago

I remember it as the quality and speed of the connection being inversely proportional. You would get 50mb/s for free at a cheap motel, but pay $25/day for "Business Class" wifi that might hit 768kb/s at the Ritz Carlton at off peak hours.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

The cheap motel would have a connection and a cheap Wi-Fi router, and you’d get the whole bandwidth (even today sometimes I find a fat nearly gigabit pipe in the middle of nowhere).

The expensive larger hotel would have a fancy barely working system from Cisco that monitored and limited bandwidth. Sometime, however, there would be an Ethernet Jack under the table that would give you full 100mb/s.

21432• 3 years ago

Did you mean you say directly/inversely "proportioned" rather than "correlated"?

(English is not my first language).

colonwqbang• 3 years ago

No, it's correct as written. "Proportional" is a very strong statement. It means that one variable is a linear function of another, i.e. y = kx. "The power dissipated in a wire is proportional to the current through the wire".

"Correlation" can mean almost any kind of relationship where a change in one variable follows a change in another. "Smoking is correlated with lung cancer".

pests3• 3 years ago

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.

nocoiner3• 3 years ago

I love this writer. Terrific writer and excellent sense of obscure yet fascinating topics. My only complaint is that the posts don’t seem to timely appear in my RSS reader - not sure I’ve ever seen a new post show up in my feed despite being subscribed.

jcrawfordor3• 3 years ago

I'll check on the RSS. It's not very well generated and I've had issues with some clients not liking it before.

EamonnMR• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I found this post via my RSS reader.

jmholla• 3 years ago

Which article is that? Sounds interesting but my rudimentary search of the archive turned up nothing.

pests3• 3 years ago

The electronic asset article (part 1 of 2) is at

https://computer.rip/2022-07-21-preventing-loss-dot-jpeg.htm...

(love the title)

The alarm one should be be obviously named.

albert_e3• 3 years ago

attributed to the Better Business Bureau, noted information security experts

is this a humorous reference that I didn't get? BBB?

tetris11• 3 years ago

They're a non-profit for consumer protection, well meaning with the knowledge they have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau

albert_e3• 3 years ago

Hmm. But are they really "noted information security experts" though?

I would have thought information security would be incidental and only one of the hundreds of aspects of business that they might look at when safeguarding consumers transacting with businesses of all kinds -- many of which (say plumbing or construction or bakeries) may hardly have infosec at the forefront. There are far more prevalent poor business practices, of the routine type - say deficient services or false advertisements, that I believe go to BBB's attention.

I never came across BBB being quoted/cited in infosec and IT contexts -- it may be just my ignorance -- happy to be educated.

jcrawfordor3• 3 years ago

I meant it as a joke, the BBB putting out consumer protection pieces about scams and malware was common in the '00s and they generally weren't any better than what journalists with no background in the topic were producing.

zokier• 3 years ago

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.

baumschubser• 3 years ago

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.

blfr• 3 years ago

it seems that it has actually become less common for cafes to offer WiFi again

In 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.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

International “free Wi-Fi” is often gated behind some confusing tracking/login pages that are only available in the local language.

Luckily playing the polite dumb tourist often is enough to get someone to enter the “real” Wi-Fi password for the non guest network.

Or sometimes there’s a login via Facebook button you can recognize via logos.

thelastparadise2• 3 years ago

divine rays of 300 Mbit wifi6

Are we sure that basking in the divine WiFi rays isn't giving us cancer?

syntaxing• 3 years ago

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.htm...

pluijzer• 3 years ago

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.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

I’ve sat outside a McDonald’s in the mottle of nowhere to connect to Wi-Fi more times than I’d like to admit.

Travelling in Europe by car I had Here maps downloaded to the phone, because it could tell me where McDonald’s were, and they always had a restroom and Wi-Fi.

Brendinooo• 3 years ago

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...

bombcar5• 3 years ago

Everything important goes over https so at worst you’re leaking some DNS, which probably isn’t a major issue.

If you VPN over the top, you leak even less.

thelastparadise2• 3 years ago

If you VPN over the top, you leak even less.

You leak just as well, but now you're leaking to the sketchy VPN provider.

nunez2• 3 years ago

Xfinity now allows non-Xfinity customers to pay $20/mo for this amazing perk. On one hand, xfinitywifi is fucking everywhere, which makes this immensely useful. On the other hand, it runs off of spare bandwidth from customer gateways...

joecool1029• 3 years ago

On the other hand, it runs off of spare bandwidth from customer gateways...

Usually, but not always. They have outdoor enterprise Hotspot 2.0 AP's all over the place in towns they usually advertise ssid as allcaps XFINITY instead of xfinitywifi.

culi4• 3 years ago

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

itake3• 3 years ago

I used Sprouts and McD almost every week as a low cost coworking. The McD coffee is like 30% the price of Starbucks, but I find the Starbucks wifi to be more reliable.

bigwheeler• 3 years ago

Somehow the McD coffee is better too.

spiffytech• 3 years ago

I've started visiting my local university library for a few hours to get work done (I'm not a student).

The WiFi is fast and reliable, the environment is peaceful and conducive to heads-down work, and the parking meter costs around what I'd pay for coffee.

Scoundreller2• 3 years ago

The global consistency of some of these franchises really comes in handy. Same with usually knowing that a Starbucks or McDonalds in Country C will have free relatively-barrierless bathrooms in places where that’s often not a thing.

myself2484• 3 years ago

Ditto with the menus. If someone has dietary needs and they don't know names of all the ingredients in the local language, they're likely to end up at a global chain.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

The global consistency of some of these franchises really comes in handy.

That was always the secret to McDonald's success.

There were plenty of hamburger joints along America's roadways when McDonald's started. But what McDonald's did is to provide a consistent experience.

The food may or may not not have been as good, but you knew exactly what to expect, which was a massive improvement over the way it was before when the price, quality, service and other things varied widely.

I heard a program about it on the radio several decades ago, and there's an entire economic theory about it, and it's the basis of modern franchising.

4star3star• 3 years ago

When my college roommate woke me up the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and told me jets had hit the twin towers, it happened to be the first year of my life that I did not have a TV in the home. We had internet and a big 19" CRT monitor, but that was it. To see what was going on, I dragged myself to the McDonald's that was within walking distance, sat down with my breakfast and watched footage of mayhem on the mounted TV. That's an odd little nook in technological history - being beyond traditional television, but the internet was still 1.0 without streaming video (or maybe just our speed wasn't fast enough).

kevstev• 3 years ago

The internet was still new enough that pretty much all major news sites reverted to a stripped down static page that day as they could not keep up with the load.

It looks like archive.org was not archiving during the "peak" of that day and only has snapshots from around 8pm that day, but you can see that they pared down the sites considerably even then: https://web.archive.org/web/20010911200318/http://www.cnn.co... Vs A few months prior: https://web.archive.org/web/20010503145728/http://www.cnn.co...

During the morning and afternoon though, I remember at certain points the NYTimes just having a headline, a picture of the airplane about to hit the second tower, and text and that's it.

98codes• 3 years ago

There was streaming video -- but not that day, largely. The big US news web sites were struggling to serve up even basic HTML, never mind a stream of any kind.

I was stuck at work and wound up watching the whole thing via a RealPlayer stream from the BBC with a 4x3 inch video.

eru2• 3 years ago

Singapore has excellent public wifi all around the country.

It's even better in South Korea.

oblak• 3 years ago

That's pretty cool. Curious what their telecoms think of this development.

emmelaich• 3 years ago

Roofnet (to be Meraki, bought by Cisco) started provided free municipal wifi in conjunction with some municipalities around 2010 or so.

There were others too; not sure why exactly it didn't work out though I can guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725163614/http://pdos.csail...

myself2484• 3 years ago

Huh, that sounds strikingly similar to Ricochet's geographic routing protocol.

giovannibonetti• 3 years ago

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.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

Usually just before boarding a flight I remember that I should download some shows on NetFlix. Half the time airport wifi is too slow to do this, presumably because it throttles netflix to make it stream at the lowest bitrate.

brewdad2• 3 years ago

I've always assumed slow airport wi-fi is that way because they have one 50mb connection being shared by thousands of users. I always connect through a VPN yet everything still runs slow. I don't think the airport is throttling specific sites.

tracker1• 3 years ago

I almost always just VPN through home, even on my phone (gets to use my pihole that way). It definitely depends from place to place though... sometimes using the VPN is dramatically slower than it should be. At least my uplink at home is now 100mbps from the 20mbps it was when I signed up, which helps a lot.

BnRJ401E29F8Q3v• 3 years ago

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.

Fatnino2• 3 years ago

I Palo Alto there's a statue of Nikola Tesla that also happens to be a free wifi ap.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

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.

moonbunR• 3 years ago

Are they really safe to use them on computers?

komali2• 3 years ago

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?

Free Public WiFi

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