Telling the Free Wifi Story

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOW, James Corbett has been nudging me to add my information about free and open wifi nodes to the OurMaps.ie project. Among other things, those maps are a mash-up of community information about where you can connect to the internet for free using wifi services in restaurants (like me in the Havana Tapas Bar at left), homes and kerbside. I've seen people pull to the side of the road outside our home where we have an open wifi node (SSID mellifont_friary) and the neighbours in the B&B down the street tell us they've seen our router blasting a signal to their south-facing rooms, much appreciated by traveling laptops. I believe the Irish government could win a lot of good will by funding a subnet inside every local authority that puts a 12 megabit per second outside every library, social welfare office, community information centre and council parking lot. The government agency could easily throttle connectivity by limited session length or type of service and in one fell swoop, the government might get something productive out of all the MANs dug into the pavement in Ireland. That aside, there are plenty of free and open wifi nodes appearing more frequently throughout Ireland. At this point, every Irish city has a hotel offering free wifi. My favourite is the Cork International Airport Hotel's offerings because you can sit in some of the most creative corners while uploading videos, checking e-mail or holding a virtual meeting with Online Meeting Rooms. As a deep recession heads towards Ireland, free and open wifi will cost less than drowning your concerns in an evening of pints. So having the service in the air is a nice way of dealing with the downturn.

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Image uploaded to Flickr using  Havana's free and open wifi node in George's Street, Dublin 2, Ireland.

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