City slickers get another 5 years of free Wi-Fi

The City of London has extended its deal with The Cloud for blanket Wi-Fi coverage, including the offer of 15 minutes of free access intended to lure surfers into paying £2 for a day pass. The service has been running since 2007, provided by The Cloud and covering just about all of the Square Mile that makes up the City of …

[Anonymous Coward]

:)

while true; do ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 hw ether `xxd -l 6 -p /dev/random | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'`; ifconfig eth0 up; sleep 900; done

[Miek]

easier sed than done.

[Lockwood]

MAN that pun was awful. Get a GREP on reality or else I will mercilessly beat you with a CAT.

[Paul_Murphy]

That's not too..

AWKward - just a bit of typing after all.

ttfn

[Paul_Murphy]

I might have a bash at that later, or at least C if I can get it working.

sorry :-)

[MacGyver]

(:

No, no, have it start from a MAC from something crazy like:

000855xxxxxx NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center

0000AFxxxxxx NUCLEAR DATA INSTRUMENTATION

00C063xxxxxx MORNING STAR TECHNOLOGIES, INC

0023C5xxxxxx Radiation Safety and Control Services Inc

000055xxxxxx COMMISSARIAT A L`ENERGIE ATOM.

000555xxxxxx Japan Cash Machine Co., Ltd.

000A2Bxxxxxx Etherstuff

0050C2473xxx Sensus Metering Systems Israel

0006CFxxxxxx Thales Avionics In-Flight Systems, LLC

That way when they do up their weekly usage slides, you can picture someone trying to figure out how Japanese ATMs and airplanes are using the network.

[Peter Galbavy]

Yeah, right

You need those 15 minutes of free to try to wade through the registration process. And then it (session management) doesn't work on an out-of-the-box Android browser anyway. I gave up a long time ago.

Helpfully it did tell me that the Cloud's commercial service was not for me.

[jonathanb]

Slight correction?

Have a very large working population (about 260,000 people) in a small area. St Davids, Wells, Ely etc are very small cities, but I'm not sure it would work so well there, because their daytime population is roughly the same as the night time population.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free is not free

Can we re-address the definition of free.

I have never been able to get 'free' wifi in the UK due to the laborious registration process which frequently fails (vodafone and BT springs to mind).

The Cloud services seem to allow me to connect but don't offer the registration page, making it pretty useless.

Lastly, none of them like me using openDNS.

If i am giving you my email address and name and you then use that to market at me, then i have paid albeit with something other than money but you can get money elsewhere by 'monetising' your data.

I recently spent some time in Vietnam where there is fast FREE internet all over the place. No registration, no sign up to offers from our partners... just free.

[Paul_Murphy]

>Vietnam where there is fast FREE internet all over the place.

I don't think it's fair to compare a first world and third world country in such narrow terms as just free wi-fi.

After all we have the NHS - that must compensate at least a little.

ttfn

[Anonymous Coward]

Free WiFI?

I've not even been able to log into uk cloud free wifi in McDonalds or Little Chef. The registration process fails (Linux). The original McDonalds uk system worked, it must have been improved. Nothing works at Heathrow IME. However Panera and Caribou work well in the US.

The UK is a wifi free zone as far as I can tell!! Greed certainly deters the potential customers.

[Sean Hamilton]

wireless site survey

Hope you will find it interesting:

Free WiFi Site Survey Software for Mac http://www.netspotapp.com/

[Pisnaz]

You know, for a small city that was in other areas behind times, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada has had wifi coverage since around 2003. Granted at the time they had a great provincial Telco and sadly it has not expanded since, but when I lived there it was dirt simple to go to town, open the laptop and with none of the hassle of hotels or pay wifi you were on and connected at reasonable speeds.

It was so handy and just seamless it still amazes me when I go places and have nothing but a hassle or get asked to pay for wifi connections.

http://www.fred-ezone.ca/