San Francisco's Got Free Wi-Fi

Carpoolio writes "If you're living in San Francisco, chances are you can connect, for free, to the BARWN -- the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. BARWN broadcasts an 802.11 signal from the top of a big hill near San Francisco, and anyone with a clear sight line to the signal can connect. Another set of wireless nodes are being placed around town by SFLan, making Wi-Fi available to tens of thousands of people."

Re:Overloaded?

[asquared256]

There are most likely multiple access points operating on different channels, and in different areas. It's probably not a single AP.

spammers paradise

[adept256]

Can anyone tell me the likelihood of tracking down a spammer at a laptop in a city the size of San Francisco?

Repeat after me.

[DAldredge]

This is paid for by tax dollars. That doesn't make it free, it means you already pay for it with the taxes you already pay.

Silly you

[Anonymous Coward]

You're operating under the premise that I pay taxes! I don't!

Not for much longer...

[advocate_one]

It will be brought to it's knees from the sheer mass of freeloading P2P traffic, not to mention all the worms looking for fresh hosts to infect.

P2P on public WIFI

[Eberlin]

Most folks think spam when it comes to large wireless networks. I'm thinking P2P -- it'll be a bit tougher to trace shared music across a public wireless network than it would be on someone's home DSL connection.

Of course this could also be a haven for computers that don't have the latest patches, have print/file sharing enabled, and don't have personal firewalls activated. For those who want to run in this, be careful.

Ann Coulter would nuke San Francisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Ann Coulter would nuke San Francisco if she and the sick, sick moral conservatives had their way.

These low-brow "holier than thou" pseudo-christian fanatics must be dealt with once and for all before they send our country back to the dark ages.

Re:Monetize THIS!

[Saeger]

Obviously the intercity/interstate/etc hierarchy of fast fiber links won't be replaced by slower wireless nodes, but mesh networks plus those fewer stems would be much cheaper and more useful than having some megacorp own the local wired/wireless every step of the way.

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Open access WiFi

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a spammers haven. Can you imagine them rubbing theyre hands in glee!

Re:Not for much longer...

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens when Johnny figures out how to change his MAC address every hour? Parasites are a hard problem to deal with in any kind of system.

54Mb shared among 500,000=108 baud

[bshroyer]

Am I missing something?

Re:its about time

[ziggyboy]

I've lived in 1 third world an 2 first world countries before. Setting up city-wide WiFi on third world countries would be a waste of their money. For one thing, they would only be catering to a niche of the society who could afford WiFi-enabled devices. Secondly, it would be too expensive for any third world country institution to be offering free internet access....much less buy WiFi equipment to handle that kind of load.

Re:Awesome

[MikeCapone]

No more bugging my friends when I'm making plans on the fly in the middle of the city and asking them to Google something for me (address, event time, etc :) I'll just have my laptop in my car...

Please google "driving safely" first. kthx