[Rooftops] Commercial WiFi for FREE Thurs, 9/25

[Jim Youll]

At 9:05 -0400 9/17/03, Tom Haley wrote:
>For those of you who haven't tried wireless Internet access yet, mark
>September 25 on your calendar.  Hotels, airports, and cafés across the
>country next Thursday will offer people free WiFi during business hours as
>part of Intel's "One Unwired Day."
>
>For more information, please visit http://www.intel.com/unwire/index.htm
>

Well, I happened to find myself purely by whimsy in Davis Square at Diesel, across the street from Starbuck's, with a borrowed Powerbook (not my usual Titanium G4) that could actually receive 3-bars of Wifi across the street... and then saw this note in my inbox, so thought I'd check it out.

The experience was not too impressive. Setting up/signing in to the account took forever (T-Mobile's servers are always very slow - even for phone account inquiries in the middle of the night)... It dropped me several times (not signal loss - it seemed to forget that I was "signed in").. did something like five re-logins over two hours...  for a while it wouldn't even accept the username/password combo as valid. The service was not particularly smooth or fast, but perfectly fine for batch e-mail in and out. I also had to make a train reservation... went home to do that with the cable modem. All  things considered, maybe it's just good to be offline sometimes (?)