US Municipalities Offering Free Wi-Fi

Posted by chayner @ 10/24/2005

My hometown of Madison, WI has just announced that they'll be rolling out a free Wi-Fi network to the whole city. They join just a few other cities nationwide (San Francisco and Philadelphia included) to move in this direction.

While I'm all for the offering of free internet, I continue to be a little weary of the possible issues involving safety and privacy with a wide open system. Additionally, I also wonder what the impact of an open Wi-Fi network will do to both the ISP's in the area, as well as the cellular companies who are hoping that their EVDO technology (wireless broadband) takes off to become the industry standard. I guess time will tell what impact these remarkable decisions will make.

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Comments

While I’m all for

Submitted by cwage on Mon, 10/24/2005 - 12:52.

While I’m all for the offering of free internet, I continue to be a little weary of the possible issues involving safety and privacy with a wide open system.

The biggest issue here is really a problem of the clients (i.e. mail/web/etc communications that are not using SSL or some other measure of protection) that broadcast everything in plaintext for anyone with an arp spoofer to read), which is something we should be wary of but isn't really the failing of a free network infrastructure. It's a failing of software and protocol.

Another concern is people blindly relying on any access point they come across -- where there is a public infrastructure for wireless, there's bound to be someone sitting with a laptop acting as an access-point and waiting for some poor sap to connect to it and be, well, 0wn3d.