Finding WiFi Hotspots

Top 5 Downtown Free WiFi Hotspots

1. City Hall Park (Downtown Alliance) Broadway & Murray St.
2. South Street Seaport (Downtown Alliance) 19 Fulton St.
3. New York City Public Library - New Amsterdam 9 Murray St.
4. Equinox 110 - Wall St @ Nassau 14 Wall St.
5. Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Park (Downtown Alliance) 55 Water St.

Finding broadband Internet access away from home has become vital for many of us. The number of Internet WiFi hotspots or access points keeps growing.

• Free hotspots are open public networks and don’t require authentication.
• Commercial hotspots require users to authenticate themselves and purchase an Internet pass.

Updating our WiFi hotspot coverage, we turn to New Media blogger, Robin Good’s recent post, “WiFi Hotspots: WiFi Locators And WiFi Sharing Communities Mini-Guide” which lists several web-based methods for finding WiFi hotspots that can be either commercial or free to use. We used each of these services to search for WiFi available within half mile of the NYC downtown zip code, 10038.

• MSN WiFi Hotspots search by location found five public open WiFi locations.
• Free-hotspot.com is easy to use and quickly found the main 5 Downtown free WiFi Hot Spots
• WiFinder 10038 zip code search found five commercial spots, but didn’t find the Downtown Alliance Free WiFi Spots
• JiWire found over forty WiFi Downtown spots, mixed between pay and free.
• Wi-Fi-FreeSpot shows that WiFi Salon and Nokia are providing free WiFi in Battery Park and that Downtown Alliance provides free WiFi in eight Lower Manhattan public spaces.
• Hotspotr Is community-driven, but since it lists the locations alphabetically, it’s difficult to find a WiFi spot near you.
• WiFiMaps Community-driven, very complete mapping of wifi routers (even residential). We found the map cumbersome.
• FON shows over a dozen “Fonernos” downtown, offering social WiFi as a part of FON’s global network.
• Whisher found only one Downtown location.

Technorati Tags:  WiFi   hotspot   New York   
downtown   

This entry was posted by O.Sudden on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 2:00 pm