Recently in wifi Category

Near my work several Caffè Nero have acquired Sip and Surf Wifi access points, now this is quite tempting, but I went on Friday and just didn't find the justification to go online. Simon Waldman has been discussing the slow growth of Wifi in the UK and points out my perfect scenario, free wifi with purchase. This is available in the UK, in places like Benugo, but sadly there is not one near me.
So I am left in a dilemma, my personal laptop I can't connect to the BBC network, yet I can blog from work, I can use webmail too, so there is no real reason to pay for internet access. It would just be nice, but probably not 20 quid a month nice and at £5 per day for a one off access I'd not even consider that.
Wifi is a deeply tempting way to access the internet, but seems to be destined to stay a home phenomen for the time being. Certainly I don't think that there are sufficient people like myself, who might pay to get serendipituous access to the internet. I can usually wait til I get home or go back to the office. Who else carries a laptop daily, students maybe, but 20 quid a month is quite a bit of money, on top of mobile phone and home internet access bills. Passing trade is not enough of a traffic provider.
So maybe cafes should take the lead from Benugo and offer free Wifi like they offer free sugar, certainly the cost per month of running a Wifi access point is not great. If you try to scale it though it becomes a cost sink and you end up charging the fees that Sip and Surf want to charge. The title for this article comes from the news that MacDonalds are going to offer Wifi access with every happy meal. It is a way to get people into the cafe, I'd buy a second drink after eating my food.
I suppose none of this is terribly original and has been said on Wifinetnews etc many times before. My realisation on Friday was personal, if a cafe near Bush House offered free wifi with purchase I'd have lunch there a couple of times a week and I'm sure that there are many people like me.
UPDATE: I've since discovered that this is the title that Wired also used for this article, which is linked in a comment from Simon Waldman's article above. the Wired piece, by Paul Boutin, covers much of the same ground, though from a US angle. I didn't conciously nick the title, but was also surprised to read the Wired article today, I must have scanned it last week.

Last night at the VoxPolitics event I used Hydra to take notes with Tom and Euan amongst others, Tom has posted the notes we wrote along with a brief reaction to the event. Unlike Euan I wasn't sharp enough to actually blog from the event, instead concentrating on IM and Hydra.
Hydra does give rise to some interesting challenges, I have a somewhat patchy memory of the actual talks, as I was writing notes. Writing, listening and watching what the other 3-4 people are typing stretches ones attention quite thin, if you add in a bit of iChat, then you get quite narrow and selective attention. The trade off is that I have a better set of notes than I'd have made by myself. Glenn Fleishman notes using iChatAV and Hydra, very successfully, to do collaborative book editing.
Donald Broadbent in 1957 proposed a psychological model of attention, which states that we can filter the stumili around us and attend to one at a time with any quality. The model is a bit old, but still is a reasonable way of thinking of how we can try to multitask. The act of writing and reading seems to disturb the transfer from short term to long term memory of the actual speaker talking.
Still, using Hydra is a great experience and it is a very useful tool for this kind of collaborative note taking experience at conferences. Natural rules or behaviours do develop, a sort of turn taking with the points that are being made by the speakers and it is the best place for a quick joke, just as quickly deleted. It is the replacement for the notepad and the passed bit of post-it pad. I need to be able to type faster though.

A while back I posted about one box Wifi solutions and noted the Linksys BEFDSR41W (no longer available, buy similar NetGear DG834G on on Amazon) which is an excellent solution to getting ADSL and WiFi at the same time. Dan later posted his first happy experience of home Wifi, which is a bit like my own - "my kitchen table is on the internet and the garden seat and the bed and…"
Coming in the other direction is the Kensington WiFi Finder, noted by Joi Ito. I have been looking for a device like this for ages, though it seems to not yet be in the shops. It is so much less hassle to get out a keyfob than a laptop, might be the discriminant for choosing your cafe, if only it could tell the free ones from the pay for access points.

Tonight at the VoxPolitics event I'll get to try out Hydra for the first time. Hydra is a group editing tool that allows multiple people to write a document together. It recently won the international award at the 2nd OS X Innovators contest. I can get a chance to use it as for the first time ever there will be a wifi network at the House of Commons.

Quick link-log type posting of London based wifi access point lists.
wifi resources for London all of these lists overlap and disagree slightly.

• Consume the net free wifi nodes.
  
• ZDNet have a map of the uk wifi pay for access APs.
  
• Freespot (Japanese site) to offer free wifi in cafes, see the Register article, the first one will be in Kingsway Hall Hotel, off Kinsgway.
  
• the cloud, see mycloud for user information. It will be up to 3000 pubs and cafes, mainly outside of London though.
  
• Sceptical article from NewsWireless about Wesminster council's plans for a wireless Soho.
  
• Boingo
  
• Wi-Fi Zone
  

Lastly a couple of themes for the future, Broadband by balloon, 18 balloons 1.5 km up in the sky to give faster than adsl broadband access, prices to beat adsl in 2-3 years, from SkyLinc.
Finally Paris looks like the place to be. I think that Fran

Recently I was lamenting the lack of a one box solution for wireless ADSL access. I knew that Dan was buying a new wifi box, but didn't realise that he'd managed to find the one box solution I was looking for. He bought a box too, a snappily named BEFDSR41W - Wireless Ready ADSL Modem Router, which is a combined modem, router 100 base T swich and it even supports port forwarding. It has a pc card slot for the wireless card to fit into, so it even makes a decent wired solution too.
A perfect one box solution, if you need wireless adsl, buy it.

UPDATE:
The router above has been discontinued, but there is a similar product from Netgear, which even has a proper antenna. It is the Netgear Wireless ADSL Modem/Router/4 Port Switch DG824M, buy it on Amazon, or buy it from Dabs.com.

I got Wifi at home, last week via a WAP11 (see setup notes I wrote), it still surprises me what a step change it is in terms of my internet access. Broadband (lovely misnomer that is it) via ADSL is quite cool fast speeds always on etc, but combine that with my powerbook and rather than the internet being a desk that you sit at...

Simple wifi adsl router modems are the sure fire internet product, I'm slightly amazed that there aren't more on the market. One box solution, external antenna, rendezvous support for setup, decent firewall and port forwarding. Rather than the three box setup I've got with adsl modem router, ethernet hub and Wifi box

Now my whole house is online, the kitchen table feels like it should have an ip address =) my laptop now moves from room to room with me, as it is a seconds effort to look at something. The simple pleasure and ease of use is delightful. I can sit where Lucy or the cats are or where the sunshine is.

rapture over - normal service will be resumed soon.

I've finally bought a wifi box for home, so that I can sit in the garden or on the sofa and blog or read email etc. Very nice it is too. I've already registered with consume.net and will be looking at the nocatauth system from nocat.net over the weekend. NoCatAuth is a capture and release system for wifi, that lets you manage a free wifi node, you can specify a certain minimum bandwidth for yourself and make people see a splash page or read and agreement.

I read about nocat in the O'Reilly book Building Wireless Community Networks, which is a little old now, but still full of lots of useful information. Another good wireless book is the Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, which is a great backgrounder on all things wireless. Have a look at their site for the book, wireless starter kit website. Glenn has another weblog dedicated to all things wireless, which is quite detailed, very useful for finding out what is happening with wifi.

I bought a WAP11. and it is quite easy to setup, but if you have a mac then I have a few tips, which I'll outline here in my next post.

The Register report on Westminster council offering a wifi service in Soho. Initially it will be for council workers only, but will become a payfor service for public usage later in the year. Quite cool and an interesting wrinkle on the starbucks, you can use it in our cafes option. Being able to use it in public places, like parks and in other shops will be great and I'd definitely consider paying, despite thinking consume.net is a great idea. London is quite a disparate place and getting reasonably consistent coverage in central London for a flatfee per month would be great. Single venues even bundled together are to widespread, free access is great but patchy, blanket local area sounds cool.