Standard for public hotspots??
Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2005 7:25 pm
Forgive me if this has been discussed. My Google skills aren't what they used to be. Point me to whatever site that describes all this.
Been looking around for a common standard for defining a hotspot as open for public use. So far all I have found is recommendations to put "open" somehwere in the SSID.
That's nice and all... Look for SSID=*open* ... Problem is my Windows wifi utils do not appear to have a means of looking for hotspots according to wildcards. Manually looking for and joining hotspots as I'm riding (someone else driving) down the interstate sounds like a chore.
What would be nice is if those who want to provide open access could all agree upon a common SSID and/or WEP key. Then all I have to do is create a "Public Only" profile with that information and feel fairly confident that when my laptop/device automagically joins a hotspot that it is one other people have explicitly setup for public use. That way I don't accidently join John Q. Public's out-of-the-box-never-read-the-instructions panics-when-the-adsl-modem-light-blinks SSID=linksys/dlink/belkin54g WAP.
IIRC, some of the smaller community networks do this. Would be nice if we could do something similar on the nationwide level.
Or am I being too paranoid and should just let me laptop use whatever hotspot it finds??
Been looking around for a common standard for defining a hotspot as open for public use. So far all I have found is recommendations to put "open" somehwere in the SSID.
That's nice and all... Look for SSID=*open* ... Problem is my Windows wifi utils do not appear to have a means of looking for hotspots according to wildcards. Manually looking for and joining hotspots as I'm riding (someone else driving) down the interstate sounds like a chore.
What would be nice is if those who want to provide open access could all agree upon a common SSID and/or WEP key. Then all I have to do is create a "Public Only" profile with that information and feel fairly confident that when my laptop/device automagically joins a hotspot that it is one other people have explicitly setup for public use. That way I don't accidently join John Q. Public's out-of-the-box-never-read-the-instructions panics-when-the-adsl-modem-light-blinks SSID=linksys/dlink/belkin54g WAP.
IIRC, some of the smaller community networks do this. Would be nice if we could do something similar on the nationwide level.
Or am I being too paranoid and should just let me laptop use whatever hotspot it finds??