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December 14, 2003
Neighboorhood sniffing II
Got to Los Angeles this afternoon, after a great night's sleep at the $35/night Casablanca Motor Lodge.
Spent the afternoon with my brother Dave and his family, who moved to Burbank a few months ago. They're on a "temporary" assignment for 6-36 months for his company, working on construction projects in the L.A. area. They decided to go wireless for their home phone, and haven't figured how to get connected to the Internet (Cingular, their phone company, wasn't very helpful in finding a way to use their cell phone for an Internet connection, and at 14.4kb/s, it wouldn't be very productive anyways).
Remembering my residential connection-finding experience from June at another sibling's apartment, I popped open my laptop, and sure enough, the invitation to form a "default" Wi-Fi connection to the Internet came right up. And with 4 out of 5 bars strength. Assigned me a NAT'd DHCP address without even asking (well, I didn't ask, I have no idea what my computer may or may not have done without my prompting).
So we ordered Dave a 802.11b PCI card for his home computer. When that arrives in a week or so, they'll be back on-line courtesy the default neighborhood network.
Dave's comment: wireless is awesome--when more people get connected to the Internet with wireless, more of their neighbors get Internet for free.
Posted by pete at December 14, 2003 09:22 PM
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Comments
You are getting quite good at this. Maybe you should offer "wireless discovery" as a service and go around finding networks and selling the information.
Posted by: Michael Kruckenberg at December 15, 2003 09:17 PM
I moved to Santa Clarita from SLC 11 months ago, and for the first 6 months, the "default" neighborhood network was my ISP.
When I got around to ordering my own DSL line from SBC (which rocks!! 1.2/Mbs downstream), I purchased a NetGear wireless router/AP, and the first thing I did was turn on WEP and MAC access control.
I sorta feel bad for not participating in the network, but not so bad that I am willing to drop my security.
Posted by: Q Wade Billings at December 20, 2003 11:55 AM