Finding WiFi on the Road

We moto-bloggers are always looking for easy and free ways to get on the Internet when on the road. The need to post pictures and ride reports can be an addiction at times, at least for me.  :)

Now that I work remotely 100% of the time in my job, the ability to work from anywhere is a reality so long as there's access to the Internet.

I am going to start "commuting" to remote locations (as in, away from home) in the next few weeks, not going too far but seeing how easy/hard it is to locate free WiFi Internet access and doing work away from one's home infrastructure.  Ride someplace in the morning and setup, work till lunch, ride for fun during lunch, work in the afternoon then ride home.

To aid in this, a bit of research yielded several options which I now present to you.

1.  An agreement was made by several major  home internet service providers, such as xfinity (aka Comcast), bright house, cox, time warner etc.  As long as you're one of these provider's customers, you can log into a participating company's WiFi hot spots and get on the Internet!

I am guessing each provider has some arrangement with these hot spots, perhaps giving them a discounted rate to allow part of their bandwidth to be shared out to the occasional roaming users.  Some of the hotspots are businesses, some are people's homes.

There is an xfinitywifi hotspot not two blocks from my house so I just walked over and was able to log in using my laptop and my comcast userid and password.  Neat.  You have to wonder though, how the homeowner feels about someone parked outside his home, accessing the Internet?

2.  There's also a WiFi Service called Jiwire.com which lists known WiFi access points worldwide.  The status of the access points can be verified by users in order to keep their database somewhat up to date.  Jiwire isn't the only one of course, there's Boingo and others I imagine, each with their own database, each with their own pros-cons.  Some like Boingo and Netzero are fee-based services.

3.  You can try searching for establishments using googlemaps.  Establishments that usually provide WiFi Internet access such as Starbucks, McDonald's and the like.  The catch here of course is they usually expect you to make a purchase or two and not just spend the day using up one of their booths!

4.  You can use your smartphone's data plan (this option can get expensive if you exceed your monthly allocation of course).  You cable up your laptop to your phone via a USB cable and use it as a hotspot.  This of course depends on your data plan, check with your provider.  I've tried it, about 3 hours of remote access to work computers via my phone cost me about 500 MB of data.  So unless you've got an unlimited data plan (quite rare these days or very costly), this is a last resort option and still requires you be within 4G/3G coverage zones of your cellphone provider.  Oh and yes, you can tether to your phone via bluetooth if you're so inclined.  Your throughput might be lower though.  Oh, and you become a discoverable hotspot as well.  Be careful with this, there's hackers out there, use a USB cable instead.

The CNET article  from which I drew most of the above information, lists other options and mentions organizations such as openwireless.org which seeks to provide open WiFi access to the world I think.  Lofty goal, not sure how widespread they are.  It's probably worth your time to give the link a full read.

Other methods are listed and described in the article but I am going to mainly try points 1-3 above in the coming weeks.