WiGLE.net

OK, I came across wigle because I'm just trying to find where in my local area (I'm in a city in the UK) there are wifi networks I can connect to, with a laptop. And I don't have any kind of IOS or android device at all so I can't download any sort of "find wifi near you maps" app, and the few other websites I found didn't list many networks. So what I'm basically trying to do is to say, within a 3000m radius of me (and I know my own lat-long co-ordinates of my address, though I don't have any GPS device, genuinely I'm a geek who doesn't have a smartphone or portable GPS) which are not password protected or which are public ones which are secured but the password has been deliberately publicaly shared the way some restaurants put up huge signs saying "network is A pasword is B". So I've tried to look through the map and advanced search functions of this website, but even when ticking that option to show only free wifi I get swamped with a huge list of what are clearly residential household routers and most of which are anciently historic too. How do I go about simply seeing on your map what is near me which actually exists nowadays, because it seems that all the little boxes on your map are not clickable to bring up more details. Furthermore I keep seeing the map greyed out with something about server maintainence (do you schedule this at 2230 ish (UK time) every night or is it a region of the world without data or is your site just crashing for me? And after trying to check about 3 networks in your list by the side of the map (I don't see their position until I click on them so can't home in on area very well) I get an error about having made too many queries for the day. Can anyone help? Most appreciated.

Hi,

Sorry you've had such a bad time with the site. Fundamentally, we're not an index of *free* WiFi - we try to be an list of *all* the WiFi, and we provide a facility for people to indicate that things are free (this isn't conclusive, just crowd-sourced). I'm surprised you're seeing too much data from this, because it's rather scarce in the dataset at large! That being said:

1. adjusting the sliders on the map will help narrow it down by time range. you can move the bottom-range up and limit the map to recently-observed.
2. the server maintenance is a matter of a piece of infrastructure we're swapping out right now; hopefully this gets better soon
3. from your query, I assume you're using the map search ("Basic" from the menus). My recommendation would be just to start with the "Map" menu item, zoom in on your area, and filter for "free" networks with a date range attached. There may not be much, but that's the simplest way. The other thing you can check out are lists of free and commercial WiFi SSIDs (public network names) and use those to filter.

Cheers,

-Ark and the WiGLE team