I recently helped a friend set up his Belkin Skype phone. The hope was to save a lot of money in phone calls while traveling by using this device to connect to Skype through wifi wherever you are. The device is very cool but I have one fundamental problem, where is all the free, public wifi?
For almost as long as Wifi has been around, I’ve heard about this idea of free Wifi being “everywhere” like airports, hotels and coffee shops. “No worries, you can just jump on some free wifi at Starbucks or something and connect”, is what I constantly hear or read. Now, I admit I travel only 2-3 times per year. However, I’ve yet to see much evidence of “wifi everywhere”. I do see paid wifi everywhere available for ridiculous amounts of money. I do see the odd coffee shop (usually not Starbucks) offering free wifi. Paid wifi service generally doesn’t work for me (and I suspect alot of others) because if I need public wifi, it’s usually for a short period of time (5 minutes to quickly check something). I’m not paying $5-10 for a few minutes of access time.
Am I crazy? Is free wifi actually available “everywhere” and I just have bad luck?
According to Jiwire, a company that provides a Wifi provider search tool, I’m right. Toronto, for example, has a dismal 35 free Wifi access points in the whole city. My home town has 6. That’s hardly ubiquitous public, free Wifi.
Since it isn’t all that easy to find free Wifi access points, I recommend Jiwire. Its database of both paid and free Wifi service is surprisingly complete and they offer a variety of ways of getting at it.