Going Wireless Away from Home

In This Chapter

Discovering public hot spots

Tools of the hot spot trade

Getting espresso and Internet at the same place

Connecting wirelessly on the road

Checking out what’s coming soon
Throughout Wireless Home Networking For Dummies, we focus — no big
surprise here — on wireless networks located within your home. But
wireless networks aren’t just for the house. For example, many businesses
have adopted wireless networking technologies in order to provide network
connections for workers roaming throughout offices, conference rooms, and
factory floors. And just about every big university has begun to build (or has
already completed, in hundreds of cases) a campus-wide wireless network
(CAN) that enables students, faculty, and staff to connect to the campus network
(and the Internet) from just about every nook and cranny on campus.
These networks are great and very useful if you happen to work or teach or
study at a business or school that’s got a wireless network. But you don’t
need to be in one of these locations to take advantage of your wireless networking
equipment. You can find literally thousands of hot spots (places
where you can log onto Wi-Fi networks) across the United States (and the
world, for that matter) where you can connect your laptop or handheld computer
to the Internet via wireless local area network (LAN) technologies.
In this chapter, we give you some general background on public hot spots,
and we discuss the various types of free and for-pay networks out there. We
also talk about tools that you can use to find a hot spot when you’re out of
the house. Finally, we talk in some detail about some of the bigger for-pay hot
spot providers out there and how you can get on their networks. The key
thing to remember about hot spots — the really cool part — is that they use
802.11 wireless networking equipment. In other words, they use the same
kind of equipment that you use in your wireless home network, so you can
take basically any wireless device in your home (as long as it’s portable
enough to lug around) and use it to connect to a wireless hot spot.