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Wireless in Boston WiFi technology, also known as 802.11b, enables wireless access to the Internet if you have proper equipment and if you are within a few hundred feet of a WiFi transmitter, or “hotspot.” But finding these hotspots, at this early stage in the technology’s evolution, can be hit or miss. Below is a snapshot of current known public WiFi hotspots in Boston. At this point these sites include “pay” access points, which require an hourly, daily, or monthly fee; and “free” hotspots that do not charge for service. NewburyOpen.net, a network of free WiFi hotspots, is by far the most extensive network of free sites in Boston — and New England. A Back Bay Wardrive “Wardriving” is the practice of patrolling a neighborhood hunting for WiFi signals from home and office WiFi base stations. Although the practice started as a way to find unsecured access points susceptible to hacking, it’s become a way to conduct legitimate street-level wireless research. Wardrive tools include a WiFi-enabled laptop computer, an external antenna strong enough to pick up WiFi Signals from the street, a global positioning satellite (GPS) unit, and software to knit all this data together. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Boston Globe technology editor D.C. Denison and Michael Oh, president of Boston Apple networking firm Tech Superpowers and creator of NewburyOpen.net, Boston’s network of free hotspots, conducted a 20-block wardrive in Back Bay (indicated in blue on the map). The purpose was not nefarious —simply an attempt to see how many WiFi signals they could find. The result: 515 WiFi access points detected including 5 academic (4 Berklee and 1 Harvard), four establishments with for-pay WiFi, 16 free public WiFi hotspots, and 490 “private” WiFi signals radiating from homes and offices. Even a WiFi activist like Oh was surprised by the saturation. “If you extrapolate from our small sample,” he said, “there are tens of thousands of WiFi access points in Greater Boston, and if you count the laptops and wireless cards using them, millions of dollars invested in WiFi-enabled consumer gear.” |
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