wireless (free or otherwise) in S'port?
 

I may resort to a driveby of rhertz's house if the options are as bad as last time I was in town and needed a connection to the world wide internets... but what are the best bets for wireless in the South Highlands area? Email mostly.

Free is nice but might pay for reliable. Am in town this coming week and may have to do some work. (saw some older posts here mention some places, PJs and Coutyard Coffee, but not sure if they are still valid).

Thanks for the suggestions.

Doesn't Starbucks (Uptown Shopping Center) offer WiFi? McDonald's (Line @ Pierremont) too.

It's scary how many open wireless networks there are in neighborhoods. I have a dell axim pocket PC and if I leave the wireless antenna on I am bombarded with available networks as I cruise through my neighborhood.

Cell Phone carriers offer a "3G" service called EVDO which is high speed Internet over their cell phone network. ATT, Verizon, Nextel, Alltel have it. I use Nextel. it costs $69/mo but works all over town. I get about 1Mbps down and 300kbps up. Latency is bad. And it drops connections on a regular basis but the coverage is totally better than WiFi and works Non-Line-of-Sight.

Now if you drive by my house, you will get 1.5Mbps in both directions over Wifi! :D but you can't use it all over the country like with ATT, Nextel, etc. (most larger cities have EVDO by now)

Downtown, I can see about 12 AP's and roughly half are not locked down. I really don't care if someone got free access off my AP (if I had DHCP running to serve them an IP) but I won't use any network I'm not authorized to use. Technically that's illegal even if harmless.

Thanks Joe.
('course, when I meant free I meant like "offered" not "pirated" :peace: so hopes there's a coffee shop or something to connect at no charge).

>Cell Phone carriers offer a "3G" service called EVDO which is high speed Internet over their cell phone network. ATT, Verizon, Nextel, Alltel have it.

AT&T uses HSDPA/UMTS, not EVDO. EVDO is used on CDMA networks like Verizon.

That's a lot of acronyms.