Wi-Fi Warsailing In The Netherlands

Roland writes "The first war-sailing event ever, AFAIK. A community based WiFi network in Leiden, the Netherlands, WirelessLeiden hold a warsailing event [Dutch links]. The war-sailing event was meant to show that WirelessLeiden is more than just a local city network. On this map you can see that 75% of the route was covered by WirelessLeiden. Vic Hayes, the Father of WiFi, was a keynote speaker during the war-sailing event. He gave a talk about how WiFi was developed. A couple of spin-offs gave presentations, namely AnyWi and KoGeRo. FYI: WirelessLeiden [English Link] has rolled out a free WiFi network covering almost the whole city of Leiden, 100.000 inhabitants, 49 nodes with 30 more to be build this year. This is the NodeMap of WirelessLeiden."

Comments

Let me tell ya :)

[etcremote]

I recently got back from the Netherlands, and let me be the first to say that they are the most security concious people WRT wireless I've ever been around. I've traveled in the US, Germany, Canada, the UK, and Italy extensively. Netherlands, hands down the best. Italy...let me put it this way: Italy go? Free surf all Day-go :)

Re:Stupid Question

[sinner0423]

if you look at this map it shows the coverage of waterways around a city with wifi access. so, i'm assuming warsailing would be sailing around in ones boat looking for a hotspot...

It's slashdot, what did you expect?

There's a big difference

[chaffed]

There's a big difference between picking up a wifi network and acutally maintaining a usable link. IMHO a lot of this "Warflying" and "Warsailing" crap serves no real purpose. In a way the less sensitive your antenna is the more acurate the location of a network is mapped. In way I am playing devils advocate and in another it is my opinion.

Re:There's a big difference

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I think his point is that with big antennas like many war*ers use, you might be able to hear the bssid packets coming out of the hotspot, but unless the person following the map has the same tooled up rig ( and the average laptop wifi user doesn't use much in the way of antennas ), it's going to look like dead air, or at best a horribly unstable link, to them.

This is common sense, again - when you're testing something, test the actual real-world version, not some turbo boosted research version that nobody following you will be able to use.

What happens

[Marxist Hacker 42]

When the inevitable gust of wind capsizes the sailboat (happend to me so often when I was learning to sail that I started leaving my wallet onshore)? Does a laptop, when it gets wet and shorts out, start working again when it dries out like a cell phone?

This is pretty cool

[periol]

There has been way too much emphasis on wireless "security" lately, and almost none on the subversive possibilities of wireless networking. Every time I see a city is putting up a wireless network, I get excited. More and more of the commercial wireless companies are starting to give up on their business models, because giving out wireless bandwidth is cheap and easy.

Seriously, the advent of free wireless, whether municipal or "lilypad", means that the internet is becoming a technology with increasingly low entrance requirements. Find an old laptop, run Linux, and start a blog.

If you're going to worry about security, do it on the machines. Leave the network infrastructure alone. Rawk!

In-water hotspots...

[cybervarun]

These results are quite interesting. That's an awful lot of wireless coverage for any body of water, including the lakes on the map.

I could definitely see something like this cropping up in the Long Island Sound and becoming quite popular with Long Island boaters who want a relaxing day on the water. I know someone was looking at hotspots in the water around NYC, and I'm sure there are already plenty of those :D

But...knowing entrepreneurship in the United States, I simply can't envision a free Wi-Fi network with range good enough to cover a body of water. In general, it seems like phenomena like this one in the Netherlands are seen more often in Europe, so where does it leave us unpriveliged Americans?

I've been doing this for two years now

[aquarian]

I spend my summers boating in the Pacific Northwest. I've been "warsailing" for two years now. Whenever I settle down in a new marina for the night, or even a cove with houses around it, I boot up and see what king of internet access I can get. More often than not, I'm able to hop on someone's network -- usually a Linksys router at the default settings. Sometimes it may be from a liveaboard boat w/ cable access (yes, they have that now in marinas), but most of the time it's from a nearby house. The signals seem to travel really well across water -- hundreds of yards.

Most better marinas have paid WiFi now. Others have somewhere you can jack in your laptop. Still others have internet cafes nearby, which capitalize on the large boater market -- everyone relies on email these days. Small marinas are starting to offer free WiFi. Internet access has become an important feature for attracting business. And there's nothng better than surfing the net from your own boat.

One beautiful evening last summer, I was sitting on the foredeck of my boat, with my laptop and a glass of red wine, reading my email while enjoying the fabulous view of the BC coastal range. It was a surreal, TV-commercial moment -- priceless! Yes, this is for real. We really can live like this these days.