In case you missed it; The Press Democrat is reporting that “Windsor Town Green soon to become a WiFi hot spot“.
Windsor’s Town Green will become the first in the county to offer free public Wi-Fi access. Hopefully more towns will follow suit.
Find hotels with high speed internet access with www.pluggedinns.com
See how your locality ranks in Intel’s survey of the top unwired Cities, College Campuses, and Airports.
Bonus Link:
Intel’s press release and a little bit about how the survey was conducted.
The Redwood Cafe in Cotati has free wireless Internet access, at least for now, plans to make it non-free are I’m sure coming.
Actually, funny story; I was in there a few weekends ago, and I had purchased a cappuccino and was busily surfing away. An hour or so goes by, and I’m done with my coffee, but I’m still surfing, and I’ve got my laptop plugged into a power outlet too.
Well I start to get this feeling like I’m being watched, and it really felt like people were eyeballing me. I paid it no mind and continued to surf. That is until I saw one of the owners eyeball me. He walked to the back of the restaurant, and then all of a sudden my connection dropped, and I could tell that I had lost the signal. Then he came back out and the signal was back again.
Now maybe I’m just being paranoid, but it sure felt like the guy went back there and rebooted the router in an attempt to get me to stop using up his power. Now I could certainly understand his (possible) concern, but I would have appreciated it much more had he just come up to me and talked to me about it.
Update: (2004-26-04 15:40)
I found out the AP is above the register at the front, so I was probably just being overly paranoid.
Inn at the Tides in Bodega Bay has wireless internet access in thier rooms. They don’t advertise it, or make any mention at all of it, but it’s there and it’s ten dollars for twelve hours.
Did I mention we are hosting a Sonic.net wireless hotspot? Well we are. I doubt that we will make any money off of it, because a. I haven’t told my neighbors about it, and b. I’m not sure how technically inclined my neighbors are.
In any case it allows me to have a secure wireless network in my house. The connection goes through an IPSec tunnel, so there’s no eavesdropping, and is authenticated on the Sonic.net side, so I know who is using my connection. Also the wireless network is on its own network seperate from the private LAN; which makes me feel better about using the usually insecure medium that is wireless.
For those interested I have some code to add to the Cisco VPN client start up script. It is real basic, it just checks to see if the wireless network you are in is the Sonic.net one, and if so start up the VPN client, otherwise don’t. This way I can roam to different hotspots and not have to hassle with bringing the VPN connection up or down, it is all just automatic. Keep reading for the code.
An interesting story over at the S.F. Chronicle. The story tells of how small business’ are leveraging wi-fi to increase foot traffic, and profits. Small business’ are getting new people to come in and stay longer (and buying more) by offering free wireless access to the internet. Big business is trying to do the same thing by offering wireless access in their business’s, but are charging customers for that access. But a lot of customers are refusing to pay for it when they can go somewhere that offers it for free; the article has a great quote about this:
My favorite hot spot coffee shop is PB and J Cafe
Tuesday McDonald’s announced the addition of broad band wireless access to 75 stores around the S.F. bay area. Pricing is $4.95 for two hours, and I seem to remember seeing somewhere that buying a value meal got you a free hour.
This is all part of nation wide pilot program McDonald’s is putting on. New York and Chicago are also included in the pilot. You can find locations on the pilot’s promotional website: www.mcdwireless.com . My favorite quote from their site is F.A.Q. number 14:
A14: All participating restaurants will be clearly identified with the distinct @M sinage. Seeing many, many laptops inside one of our restaurants will also provide a valuable clue.
It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. Wireless is big news in technology circles, and is spreading like wild fire, but it has yet to prove to be profitable. It is sort of a catch 22, there is not that much public demand for high-speed wireless access, so wireless providers are hesitant to increase coverage areas, but how can you increase demand if the people who would use it, can’t because there is not enough coverage?
McDonald’s is betting that the wireless services will bring in a new class of clientele; students and business travelers, who probably never thought about stopping in at a McDonald’s before, but who may now that they can check their email there. Other sectors have been using wireless to entice customers to their business, hotels, airports and cafes being the most noteable ones.
This story first came to my attention from the Press Democrat article .
