Attack of the Wi-Fi Girls
Adventures in Wirelessness
Picture this: You're at the San Francisco airport, you're nearly broke, your flight home is snowed out, and you are destined to end up sitting on the airline waiting room floor with a couple hundred grumpy people, eating toothpaste for dinner, a modern-day Oliver Twist. Before you succumb to this fate, you grab a city bus in to San Francisco. You go to the nearest Starbucks, open up your laptop computer, and go on-line to Priceline.com. You bid on a room in a four-star hotel in Union Square for $45. In ten minutes your bid is accepted, your credit card is charged, and you walk down the street to the Grand Hyatt. You check in to a hotel room that usually goes for $200, and change your clothes for a nice boat ride and dinner in Sausalito.
Okay, so that was me. How did I perform this casual miracle? Wirelessly.
Let's Get Started...
You don't have to have been living on an ice floe for the past few years to have missed this aspect of the wireless revolution - it's been a nice little secret among mobile geeks for a while. We take radio, television and cell phones for granted, and they work much like the wireless internet that I tapped into at Starbucks. Information is transmitted through the air to a receiving device and there you have it. A person with a wi-fi enabled computer can get on to the Internet, often at ethernet speeds, without wires. I've met new laptop owners in coffee shops who didn't realize their computers had wireless cards - after a quick demonstration I feel like Prometheus, bringer of fire. Wireless internet connections are floating around public libraries, truck stops, Blimpie's sub shops, Starbucks and independent coffee houses, McDonald's (fer cryin' out loud), print and computer stores.
Here's what you need:
- A computer or handheld device
- A compatible wireless card and software
- Proximity to a wi-fi base station, and
- Access or permission (an account, password or an free open signal) to use the station's signal to get onto the Internet
The computer can be a newer desktop (for a home or office network) or laptop model (for mobile computing). Many handheld devices like Palm pilots also work but trade portability for limited screen size and smaller memory.
Your wireless card should be 802.11 compliant (which they mostly all are) and costs $60-$100. This small credit-card sized device with a little antenna fits inside the computer.You don't really need to worry about technical details, though; the easiest thing to do is to ask your favorite geekware vendor to install a wireless networking card that will work in your computer. If you mail-order the card, it's easy to install. Many of the Macintosh laptops and desktops come with an Airport wireless card already installed, and all you have to do is turn it on.
A base station that is connected to DSL, cable modem or ethernet (or even a regular telephone line) is the next thing to find. Starbucks stores have wi-fi provided by t-Mobile, and so you turn on your computer, wi-fi card, and a browser like Explorer, and through the web page you pay for air time. (I currently shell out $50 for 300 minutes, and use it in ten minute chunks.) Some places have free wireless access, including a public wi-fi project in Paris, which I consider to be the height of cool. (They pronounce it wee-fee there, which I think is cute.) McDonald's has announced that they soon will be providing an hour of wi-fi with each Value Meal, which really REALLY makes it a value meal. If you Super-size it, who knows what you'll get?
You can make your own wireless network at home by connecting a base station (about $200) to your phone line or high-speed internet cable and be on line anywhere in the room (or sometimes the block). A DSL line connnected to a base station like a Linksys router or Macintosh Airport base station can serve 50-100 simultaneous users, which tells you how much bandwidth your humble home cable is capable of.
Let's Get Spoiled...
About a year ago, I bought an Airport wireless card for my Macintosh laptop. and my friend Maud offered to install it and show me the many splendors of wi-fi technology. What started as a nice connectivity feature turned into a measure of quality of life. Most of my friends are Macintosh freaks with high-speed wi-fi in their homes, and after you've spent a snowy evening in bed writing your latest opus on a wi-fi enabled laptop, occasionally viewing the weather report, reading email from friends, and getting instant messages from friends in Brazil and Australia, you'll see the Internet in a whole new light.
If you want to make your own wireless network at home, you may run into a little resistance from your cable or DSL provider. The bigger ones don't like the idea of having their bandwidth used by more than one user per account, even though each line can easily handle 50-100 users at any given time. There are workarounds, and if they tell you that you can't put a wireless router or airport station on your line, tell them thank you and look up any wireless interest group like SeattleWireless.net and ask them for help. It's neither illegal (as long as you don't re-sell their bandwidth) nor difficult.
I began to evaluate a city or town by how seamlessly it incorporates certain quality of life features like dog parks, mass transit, espresso availability, and free wi-fi. Boston is probably the best I've found so far. Other places are fast catching up - see sidebar for updated lists of access points across the United States.
Go to Amazon, get current, and save dough.
LOOKING FOR FREE WI-FI?
IN BOSTON:
Trident Booksellers & Cafe
338 Newbury St
Boston, MA 02115
Main Phone: 617-267-8688
Fax: 617-247-1934
Free wi-fi courtesy of NewburyOpen.net, an excellent cafe with wheatgrass, espresso and a wonderful menu; used and new books, cards, magazines, blank journals and nifty New Age stuff.
NewburyOpen.net provides an Internet Cafe and free wireless (WiFi) on Newbury Street .
1369 Coffee House
1369 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-576-1369
IN SEATTLE
SeattleWireless.net has a list of local wi-fi connections that is constantly updated
NATIONWIDE
Looking for access? These lists aren't complete, or all free connections, but are helpful:
WILLING TO PAY?
Strong signal and availability aren't guaranteed, but available in a good many mainstream locations for a decent price.
T-Mobile (serves Starbucks stores and then some)
Wayport serves large hotels and airports for a fee
Boingo provides access in many urban locations
HARDWARE WE LIKE
Apple's AirPort Extreme .54Mbps AirPort Extreme, based on IEEE 802.11g wireless draft specification, delivers nearly five times more bandwidth that the earlier 802.11b models. (This all still depends on what you have it plugged into.)
April 2003
DUMB-ASS TRIPS
by Leslie Strom
Attack of the Wireless Girls Part II
More good links:
Paris Goes Wireless (A news article from Salon.com)
Will You Buy Wi-Fi? (Hey, not me. I'm not paying unless I'm desperate.) A news story from Time magazine.