Comments on: Who do you use for international WiFi?

By: Stuart Ashmore

Stuart Ashmore — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:43:16 +0000

While I was on holiday in the Sierra Navada mountains above the city of Granada in Spain, I found myself in desparate need of a wifi connection. I had to sort an email response for something that was important enough to warrant a phone call that disturbed my very well earned rest. The village of Lanjaron is very remote and I wasn’t hopeful of finding an unsecured network. In desparation, I fired up my laptop and wandered down the high street, hoping against hope that something would turn up. BINGO! It turned out that the local Post Office wifi network was good and strong and unsecured. Even better, it was directly opposite a very nice cafe. I’m not into war driving (is that what its called?) and I’m certainly not a hacker, but being a curious sort of chap I have take a sneeky “look see” when in the vacinity of other Spanish Post Offices – so far “every egg a chicken” as my old dad used to say.

By: mark

mark — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:41:53 +0000

I use boingo got a free month with my nokia N800 and its also priced in $ which is good at the moment

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:41:17 +0000

…and another thing: I’d never use public WiFi anyway now, after understanding just how easy it is to spoof the login page and then capture all your subsequent actions – esp. Credit card details. Unless you are using VPN for everything I’d be very afraid of public wifi.

Solution: buy a local data USIM and use a USB Modem, card or Joikuspot on a spare wifi device. N95 or E51 best as they are HSDPA. Have just spent a day travelling using just this combo with laptop & iPhone. Brilliant.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:32:32 +0000

I agree that BT Openxxxx is a disjointed, badly executed experience, that does nothing to make it easy. At Waterloo it’s only 802.11b FFS! And don’t get me started on the utterly crap per-session web login system they employ.

I’m sorry, but if the nation’s biggest ISP can’t sort something as simple as a wifi service they deserve to loose customers to other WISP’s or 3G.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:39:54 +0000

Heya, have you seen Whisher? They are offering per-minute WiFi at many locations, including Barcelona airport (I once had to use it and the welcome page for sign-up was awful, it took me longer than I had before the flight so I gave up eventually). Last I saw they were looking for testers and giving away some free vouchers, give it a whirl, it makes a change to pay only for the used minutes with no monthly fees (I have Boingo too).

By: Terence Eden

Terence Eden — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:33:30 +0000

I use http://www.fon.com – as I share my WiFi, I can roam onto any other user’s WiFi. Depends on where you go, but there’s normally some coverage. Now that they’re partnered with BT, there should be even more.