How can i check if there is a Wireless Network in my area? I mean networks like Universitys have and coffee shops?
I know that at my house it connects automatically because i have no security whatsoever on my network, but it doesn't semm to work at commercial places or my university.
http://www.aspecto-software.com/rw/applications/wififofum/
kramerica2 said:
How can i check if there is a Wireless Network in my area? I mean networks like Universitys have and coffee shops?
I know that at my house it connects automatically because i have no security whatsoever on my network, but it doesn't semm to work at commercial places or my university.
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Take a tip and protect your wireless network at home. Up until recently mine was unprotected as I didnt think anyone lived close enough to me who was into computers. Was down late one night and just happened to see the wifi light on my router blinking. I knew no one else was up on the laptop or psp and I wasnt using my phone so I started to wonder what the hell was going on.
On investigating I found a computer as part of my workgroup called mikey_234234 or something similar. Seems there was someone close enough and they were kindly using my broadband and probably sharing my files ( although it was only a small folder with ppc stuff in it ).
I protected it straight away and the light stopped blinking and now the mikey computer has gone. Someone somewhere has lost their free ride.
Seriously protect your network my friend.
I always protect my Wireless Network(s).
Or via TKIP (password authentication), or simple MAC Adress Filtering.
Although I don't have a datalimit, it's fun to see unprotected networks and fun to use them.
Buying a wireless router is just like buying a car, it works plug-and-play, but you gotta lock it, otherwise people will get in
Related
Hey guys.
I bought my XdaIIs almost a year ago, but have had no need to use the WiFi until quite recently. I'm with O2 on the 200 Plan (light user) and everything works fine with the phone, including the GRPS: apart from the WiFi. When the phone was sold to me I was told very clearly, and on multiple occasions, that if I can pick up a WiFi signal, and that it's free, then I can connect and browse for free. I don't have a WiFi connection at home, so it's only when out and about that I need to connect. However, when I tried this at a Coffee House that had free access I could only connect via one of two of O2's "Gateway Partners" and they wanted to charge me for this, which I find outrageous! Can someone confirm to me whether this is correct, as O2 told me that I have to be a "Business User" on a Business Plan to get free WiFi, and that the fact that the phone has WiFi doees not mean that they support it!
If the above is the case, is there anyway around this, such as unlocking the phone, or connecting via a completely different network? I just find it galling that O2 can mis-sell me the phone on the basis that I can connect via WiFi "anywhere and anytime for free" and then to be told that this isn't the case.
Thanks in advance.
Tron
Tron,
WiFi isn't free. It's usually provided by some operator (e.g. BT, The Cloud, T-Mobile, etc), and these guys want money for providing a service.
Generally you can create an account with them whilst you are in a WiFi Hotspot - and their charges vary. It's nowhere near as prevalent as GSM, so you'll find that not all of these operators have agreements between themselves; basically this means that you can use an operators account only with it's partners.
As for if "if you can see a wifi signal it's free" - it's not true. Not wishing to condone anything illegal, you can generally get away with it if there's no encryption on the access point; but it is illegal to use a signal that is not meant for you. The idea of unlocking your phone doesn't really apply in this case either - it's nothing to do with the network lock but the way the people who run the equipment choose to charge; remember the equipment for WiFi is completely separate from the Mobile GSM network you use when you call someone on your mobile.
As for the O2 WiFi network/partners, I've no idea about the pricing. But it does make sense that they would have a different tariff for those subscribing to their wifi service, like their Business Plan.
No doubt the salesperson over-played this a bit when selling it to you!
Hey Bal, thanks for the reply.
So, if I'm sitting in a Library, for arguements sake, and they have a completely free and open WiFi connection, how am I meant to connect? Surely O2 via "The Cloud" cannot charge me to use someone's network who are letting me use it for free: can they? Likewise, if I pop around your house and you let me use your connection, do I have to connect via one of O2's partners? That's what I'm trying to get at, I guess.
Thanks once again.
wifi is just like a normal network between computers you set up at home
you can let people from the outside hop on if you want
but you are to blame if they abuse your network connection though i guess
some places offer free wifi too some plane companys offer it in their planes
some trains offer it
7-11 offer it and so does mcdonals i believe
Rudegar is right of course, if it's free and you open your wireless lan manager you should see the network and be able to connect without a password.
This has nothing to do with the mobile operator you have a contract with.
It's the same as you bringing your laptop over to my place and plugging it into the wired lan - only difference being that there are no wires involved.
If you think of your wifi as just a way of "plugging into" a network rather than as part of your mobile it makes more sense.
I would suggest that you find somewhere with wifi access and have a play - you'll learn much more that way
well if the mobile operators wanted to they could offer it
and charge people for it of cause it would require them
to set up MANY hotspots and repeaters to service all their customers
Okay, cool. Thanks for all of the help guys. I guess I'll have to wander around an find a free WiFi spot (there are none that I know of anywhere near me).
Ross
or you could just get a wifi router for your internet connection for your normal computers should you have a such
and make your own hotspot
As I travel I find more hotels are offering wired broadband in the room, often free.
Fine for a laptop, but how does poor little XDA make use of this? I thought of carrying a wireless router modem in my suitcase (some are fairly light), but there must be a simpler solution??? Any suggestions?
True, you can sometimes find a wi-fi point "free" but only in the more civilized parts of the world.
I was also thinking of carrying my old Psion infa red battery modem to connect to hotel phone line at 56k, but that's a bit passe.
Thanks.
hotel broadband observations
I find that if I stay at the more up-market brands like Hilton or Sheraton or Mariott they nickel and dime you for everything, typically broadband will set you back ten bucks a day.
However if you stay at their slightly less expensive partner brands like Fairfield, Courtyard or Hampton inn, you get the points for the up-market places (or airline miles) and the internet tends to be free.
At least in the US hotels are pretty densely concentrated around freeway interchanges or business districts and sometimes the wifi signal from one hotel bleeds over into another. Its been interesting to see how this has evolved over time. The conversation would often go like this...
Customer - "Do you offer broadband wifi here at Brand X?"
Clerk - "Well, WE don't offer it but Brand Y next door does. Typically if I put you in a room on that side you'll probably be able to pick up their signal just fine." Translated, the connection is going to be very weak and you're going to say the heck with it and dial up - or try to use GPRS/EDGE and thats not typically going to work very well because in-building coverage with GSM1900 is lousy unless you happen to be near a window on the side of the building closest to the cell site. (It's even lousier because of the Wizard's antenna design!!)
The upshot of this has been the hotel chains with broadband have caught on that their neighbors will leech off of them, thus they have passwords that change every week. They don't do encryption because that would make the poor front desk clerks bleed out their ears, its more of just getting your MAC address on an access list in some manner. Broadband is included but they keep the customers next door at Brand X from coming along for the ride by giving their customers a little card with a sticker and that week's password. At authentication, which naturally only works best with IE because apparently the developers haven't heard of bloody firefox in most cases... it appears that your MAC address is stored for 24 hours and then you don't have to authenticate again until about the same time the next day. Some of them appear to be far more sophisticated, don't require a password, and appear to triangulate your room location in some manner - I'm totally guessing but I bet the access server polls all of the access points to see which ones can see traffic from your MAC address but that's just speculation.
In my experience my T-Mobile MDA (HTC wizard) will sometimes authenticate to hotel networks and sometimes not. It's usually not a signal strength problem, its that the IE browser thats installed in Windows Mobile 5 isn't quite up to running whatever script is authenticating you. If the PDA is all you carry, you're totally dependent on the web page the hotel uses for authentication happening to work correctly on your handheld device. If you're at one of the up-market places that nickel and dime you for everything you're still going to have to authenticate to their internet server over a wired connection and that may or may not work on your handheld. It also may or may not work over the NAT'd connection you get with a wireless router and if you need tech support you better be pretty darned able to B.S. them into thinking you're using a PC with Windows XP. It also completely varies from property to property, don't expect consistency in this area across one particular brand of hotel.
If you only carry a handheld 802.11x device and a wireless router, you better set a strong password and encryption key on it lest some other hotel guest changes your network name to "owned" and/or they download something they ought not to and the data trail leads back to your room's port.
When I arrive at a hotel and plug in or connect my 802.11x through my laptop, I hold my nose and launch IE until I get put on the access list, then I can typically launch firefox and kill the IE pig out of memory.
sorry for the newb questions but couldn't find an answer searching and figured someone who knows would be able to give an answer easily
the question is, when in the office, sitting near my laptop (dell lat 620 w wifi) I connect my phone to the wifi network 'wfield1' and the display on the laptop turns green, and the phone shows the little antenna signifying wifi connectivity. ok- now does this mean
a) that all data sent/rec'd will not appear on cingulars bill?
b) will my works firewall (vpn) infringe upon my browsing (ie if I hit a blocked site will it say blocked on my phone?)
I originally thought it would but I turned wifi on and walked away from my laptop and realized that the wifi connection stayed on throughout the building so therefore it has nothing to do with my laptops connection to our vpn server then right?
if so, c) would I be able to use the phones wifi connection and then usb tether the phone to the laptop to browse on the laptop off the firewall and off cingulars rate charges? I have unlim anyway but keeping usage down seems worth the small step it takes to tether
hopefully I am at least a little accurate in my guesses and not way off wack. if anyone could drop some knowledge on me id appreciate it
Your phone's connection to WIFI has nothing to do with your laptop. It should connect to your WIFI router in your office. Your phone should display a different symbol on the top line of the LCD, rather than your regular "antenna" symbol.
You need to check the above before you can confirm if you are actually connected to your WIFI router.
When you are on WIFI, it is subjected to the same firewall regulations as your laptop
yes it changes from the normal "phone" antenna to the wifi icon, i do know that much.
however i'm still unsure of whether or not it is using routered data vs cingular data. i think it is using the wifi data because as i said it is showing the wifi symbol and not the E or G that shows up when connected to cingulars service
and i think i mispoke, i dont actually use the wifi on the laptop to connect to the internet. i need to dial up with a verizon card, and it connects that way, and also launches a VPN which i think is what regulates the internet usage.
i am less worried about the routers firewall than i am my (proxy?) servers abilty to record sights that i visit, ie the forums/ebay. if i visit those on wifi and my server could see that (not worried about the wifi router seeing it since i am in different offices a lot), i will just stick with using GPRS/EDGE. confusing? sorry
If it was using Cingular data, you would get a message that your phone is 'Connecting to Cingular GPRS' ..in which case you would be billed, you don't get billed for using wifi because you are NOT using cingulars network to connect to the internet, you are using your own.
after checking it again, it seems that i cannot get to the iinternet with the wifi alone. i turned off the phone and had wifi enabled and could not connet to the internet.
so normally, if it wasn't a work firewalled network, wifi will let you get to the internet without being charged via cingular. got it, thanks all
hey i was going to do wifi connection to my work laptop too till i decided its pointless cause im sitting right in front of the thing and if i actually walked away from it its going to be a decent distance and the wifi wouldnt connect anyway.
besides theres not a whole lot you can do with the connection other than read a web page or browse a network folder.
Hello,
After finding the amazing WMWifiRouter I keep on searching for a program to help me extand the wifi range in my house, since some rooms i have no wifi in range.
I thought to put the mobile i got (Touch Diamond) in the middle where it can reach my home network, and connect to my home network through it.
In one sentence: make it a wifi repeater..
Any good suggestions?
Is it possible at all?
UMMM no probably not. What you are talking about is mimo and there is no need for it in general. you could use wmwifirouter as you gateway to the internet and use your home router to connect other computers. YOu would have a heating problem and power problem on your phone tho trying to boost the signal to connect. Tho you could move the router closer to the senter useing your phone to provide the internet connection and then you could put it where ever you can get the best coverage in the house. There are instructions on there website on how to do this even using DHCP from the phone thru the router. So maybe this way.
Pocket PC Wifi Repeater
I would also be very interested in this capability, I was in a hotel ounce where I had good wifi in bathroom but not at the desk. So when great wifi is just barely out of range this would be a great utility.
i would be glad to have something like that too.
I would request this by email to WMWifiRouter or if they have a forum not sure if they read posts here
Every day I go to my local coffee shop. When I want to connect to the net, my Nexus shows wifi points available and I choose the appropriate one for the cafe. It doesn't need a password, but it does show a webpage where you have to agree to the terms by click the Ok button.
Is there anyway to automate this, or get around this? Its such a pain in the ass! I have Tasker if that makes any difference.
Thanks,
Jon
That is called a captive portal and no.
Or called a splash page. I worked for a hotel wifi company and we used devices called "nomadix." When you connect, the device gives you an IP, then sticks you in a pending stage until you click OK or Accept on the portal page. Until then, it won't let any IP based traffic through. Usually there's a timeout that they can modify. But being in a cafe, I highly doubt it. They're probably using a walmart bought wifi router with ddwrt firmware. I know starbucks has a splash page for their wifi.
Well, there is *sort* of a way around it, but not very convenient for cafes/etc. I am currently staying at a hotel that has said portal to access the WiFi network. What I have done is connected to said WiFi network with my laptop, then utilized "connectify" to re-transmit that authorized WiFi to me and my wife's devices. Basically turning my laptop into a wireless router. Another plus is that I can set my own WEP/WPA/etc protection to the retransmitted signal. So while this may not be a solution for cafes, etc - it certainly is a fantastic one for hotels!
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
I believe there are a few apps in the market which can automate this for some portals, but it's basically just scraping the page and trying to guess some information to put in, etc, so it won't work 100% of the time.
I haven't used any, so no specific suggestions, but here's a few from search:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=wifi login
i have this exact problem with the wifi in the pub i chef in. our broadband is provided by HEINEKEN beer. we also must connect then load browser window to accept terms.
the pub owner would also like it removed to allow people to auto-connect in the normal way because obviously when a customer steps outside for a ciggerette as it is illegal to smoke inside a public place in the uk now,. they would then need to keep re-connecting theyre phones/tablets...
ive managed to switch a total of 8 staff and about 25 customers to ditching ios for android there normaly at least 3 nexus 7's at any one time in my pub now :victory::victory: and our bar now also has nfc tags.
The app Wi-fi web login seems to be working for me.