Discovering Public Hot Spots

Discovering Public Hot Spots
A wide variety of people and organizations have begun to provide hot spot
services, ranging from individuals who have opened up their home wireless
networks to neighbors and strangers to multinational telecommunications
service providers who have built nation- or worldwide hot spot networks
containing many hundreds of access points. There’s an in-between here, too.
Perhaps the prototypical hot spot operator is the hip (or wannabe hip) urban
cafe with a digital subscriber line (DSL) and an access point (AP) in the
corner. In Figure 16-1, you can see a sample configuration of APs in an airport
concourse, which is a popular location for hot spots because of travelers’
downtime when waiting for flights or delays.
Virtually all hot spot operators use the 802.11b standard for their hot spot
access points — we don’t know of a single one anywhere in the world that
uses the newer standards. This is good because the majority of wireless networking
equipment in use today uses this standard. Note: If your laptop or
handheld computer has an 802.11a-only network adapter in it, you won’t be
able to connect these hot spot operator’s networks. If you use 802.11g equipment,
you should be able to connect because 802.11g equipment is backward
compatible with 802.11b. Head to Chapter 2 for a refresher on the 802.11
Wi-Fi standards.
Of the myriad reasons why someone (or some company) might open up a hot
spot location, the most common that we’ve seen include the following:
In a spirit of community-mindedness: Many hot spot operators strongly
believe in the concept of a connected Internet community, and they
want to do their part by providing a hop-on point for friends, neighbors,
and even passers-by to get online.
As a municipal amenity: Not only individuals want to create a connected
community. Many towns, cities, boroughs, and villages have begun
exploring the possibility of building municipality-wide Wi-Fi networks.
There’s a cost associated with this, of course, but they see this cost as
being less than the benefit that the community will receive. For example,
many towns are looking at an openly accessible “downtown Wi-Fi network”
as a way of attracting business (and businesspeople) into downtown
areas that have suffered because of businesses moving to the suburbs.
A way to attract customers: Many cafes and other public gathering
spots have installed free-to-use hot spots as a means of getting customers
to come in the door and to stay longer. These businesses don’t
charge for the hot spot usage, but they figure that you’ll buy more
double espressos if you can sit in a comfy chair and surf the Web while
you’re drinking your coffee.
As a business in and of itself: Most of the larger hot spot providers have
made public wireless LAN access their core business. They see (and we
agree with them) that hot spot access is a great tool for traveling businesspeople,
mobile workers (such as sales folks and field techs), and the like.
They’ve built their businesses based around the assumption that these
people (or their companies) will pay for Wi-Fi access mainly because of the
benefits that a broadband connection offers them compared with the
dialup modem connections that they’ve been traditionally forced to use
while on the road.
Another group of hot spot operators exists that we like to call the unwilling
(or unwitting!) hot spot operators. These are often regular Joes who have
built wireless home networks but haven’t activated any of the security measures
that we discuss in Chapter 10. Their access points have been left wide
open, and their neighbors (or people sitting on the park bench across the
street) are taking advantage of this open access point to do some free Web
surfing. Businesses, too, fall into this category: You’d really be shocked how
many businesses have access points that are unsecured — and in many
cases, that their IT staff doesn’t even know about. It’s all too common for a
department to install its own access point (a rogue access point) without
telling the IT staff that they’ve done so.
We tend to divide hot spot operators into two categories: free networks
(freenets) that let anyone associate with the hot spot and get access without
paying; and for-pay hot spots that require users to set up an account and pay
per use or a monthly (or yearly) fee for access. In the following sections, we
talk a bit about these two types of operators.