15 Aug 2010 1 min read Daily Musings

Free Public WiFi

[EDIT 2018/03/27] Initially in the /. article and this post I wrote about APs but I meant the physical device. I was running the network in Ad-Hoc mode. Before the Belkin, I actually used a P150 laptop to host the AdHoc network of the same name probably even earlier than 2004. Maybe 2002? I had a PCMCIA card and created Free Public WiFi as an experiment.

One day I decided to take my 11 megabit 802.11b access point by Belkin with me to school. This was in 2004/2005. When I set up the network I made it an ad-hoc network called Free Public WiFi.

I wanted to give my laptop access, and students as well who had laptops with WiFi. The school didn't have WiFi yet. So I hooked an Ethernet cable up to the school's LAN, and used Internet Connection Sharing to share to the AdHoc network Free Public WiFi. So it didn't start as a scam or a network with no Internet. It started, at least in my case, with a student committing some sneaky WiFi sharing.

Well it seems to have spread to Toronto. I see networks by the same name everywhere, even in 2010. I sometimes wonder if it's the same ad-hoc network I started spreading like a virus through people's machines when they save the address.

You see Windows will connect to Free Public WiFi even if nobody is broadcasting in the area. You just become the first node.

Weird.