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Austin Becoming Wi-Fi Hot Spot
Omega1045 writes "The Austin Chronicle is running an interesting article on how Austin is fast becoming the Wi-Fi Capital of the Free (as in beer) Wireless World. With the industry standardization board Wi-Fi Alliance moving to Austin earlier this year, and groups like Austin Free-Net helping local businesses, the article quotes Austin has having more hotspots 'than anywhere else on the planet'. While this article does quite a bit of bragging about Austin, it also does a great job of highlighting how businesses and local non-profits can work together to promote and profit from free Wi-Fi Internet access. This provides an excellent model for other cities to follow using tools like Less Network."
So, if this is becoming availible when will it hit the rest of the world? Well, we can't do much but hope.
So you can get free wi-fi...
.
.
.
but you have to live in Texas.
-Letter
The abundant Wi-Fi saturation in the area is actually causing interference between access points. The over-propagation in the area is incredible.
Props to GNAA!
I'm moving to Austin. Err, once I move out of my parent's basement.
The world is ready for a new way of doing business and living life. It's not about more money and more stuff. It's about knowing the difference between a life well-lived and a life that's purchased. It's about how much you can do with what you have.
(i.e., free Wi-Fi == good)
http://www.wirelessleiden.nl/english/ is well in the lead with over 50 nodes (not just hotspots) on churches, schools, offices and other tall buildings :-) And all open source to boot (fetch yours at http://wleiden.webweaving.org:8080/svn/node-config ) or persue the configuration http://www.wleiden.net/cgi-bin/g_list.pl and actual status: http://uuu.wirelessleiden.nl/nodemap.jpg.
Dw.
This won't mean much soon. I live in Portland, and wireless is everywhere. It seems the west coast in general is pretty wired at this point.
In about a year or so, this will be a moot point anyway. Everyplace will have wireless broadband soon enough....
What you're saying might be true for towns say, Bryan College Station in Texas, where Texas A&M is located.
That may have been closer to true 15 years ago, but not now. With the huge expansion of Austin during the dot com years, the UT Campus doesn't make up anywhere near 90% of the city. Heck, it didn't make up 50% 15 years ago. Have you been to Austin, and if so, did you make it out of downtown?
The "Northern Coridor" up highways US 183 and IH 35 are where many of the tech companies are located (IBM, Motorola, Dell), and where many of the techies live. It is hard not to find a coffee shop in the this area that doesn't have wi-fi, at least from my experience. And I would be willing to bet most of those campuses are WiFi.
In closing, RTFA.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Portland's Personal Telco Project has well over 100 free hotspots throughout the city. Austin Free Net has 36 (based on their listing of hotspots which have libraries listed from 1-22 and other places as A-O). The city of Portland is also working, in cooperation with the local university, the city government, and various megacorps (such as Intel) to blanket the entire city with free WiFi (see Free For All).
But, it doesn't matter much who wins. What's great is that independent groups are popping up all across the country (and presumably, the planet). I know that Portland, Boston, and Austin all have growing free WiFi organizations, and I'm sure there are others.
Do you know how nice it is to take your iBook, Vaio, whatever, down to the local park and have free high-speed WiFi access? Thanks to these people (and others!), some day you will.
Let me tell you, it's nice. It's the sort of thing you'd expect from the 21st century.
The University of Texas at Austin makes up about 90% of the city.
Current population of Austin, Texas : 680,899
UT of Austin student population: 50,000
2+2 is still 4 and 7.34 percent of 680,899 is still 50,000...
Everybody knows 2 + 2 = 4... and 1111, 100, 11, 1 and 22.
Yours, Mr. Coward.
802.11 B isn't the way to go anymore either. Move on over to 802.11 g and experience faster data transfer. The basics are that you have to know what kind of monster you are trying to attack here. What kind of building do you live in? Do you have copper pipes? What about plaster walls? Do you have a microwave oven and a keg-a-rator next to where you are going to be surfing the web? If so, you need to step you the transmission a little. Do some googling on boosting your signal.
I don't want to flame you, but you can't kill a technology that has tons of potiential and may alter the future only because you have had some bad experiences. For all you know, it could have been that 2.4 ghz cordless phone you bought at Best Buy that killed your connection. Or maybe you may leave in a nuclear fall out bunker. I bet a Wi-Fi WAP wouldn't transmit 10 ft in one of those.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
businesses and local non-profits can work together to promote and profit from free Wi-Fi Internet access
1. Free Wi-Fi Internet
2. ???
3. Profit!
Maybe I'm wrong, but shouldn't 2+2=10 in base four?
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
I live in a small town -with wal*mart being our nearest retail store- and I chuckle every time I see their WiFi cards, routers, etc sitting and gathering dust.
The nearest hotspot is most likely 12 miles away!
2+2 != 5, but RTFA + mapquest > "simple logic".
This has nothing to do with the university which is nowhere close to 90%, or even 10% of Austin.
Additionally, and as someone else has pointed out before, UT Austin does not make up 90% of the city. Austin, TX has almost a quarter of a million square miles, according to this site, whereas UT Austin only has 0.5 square miles associated with it, according to this site (you can do the unit conversion from acres to square miles yourself).
a friend and i were driving among the streets of austin (not just downtown or near UT, but in and around other places) and it is possible to simply jump from hotspot to hotspot while waiting for the light at an intersection or while driving around.
They're everywhere. Virtually every decent pub, restaurant and coffee shop here has free wireless.
-
Here comes the child porn surfers driving around with no pants on.
Austin has great wireless indeed. Alot of it is due to the great coffeehouse scene. Sure many parks, neighborhoods,bars,theaters, and restaurants are getting them at a breakneck pace. But the boom in wireless here is mainly at the coffeehouses in Austin which rivals the coffeehouses that I have been to in New York, Seatle and San Fran.
I chuckle every time I hear about "wireless" networks because every time I wander into starbuck's or any other spot with wireless everyone with a computer is jockeying for the power outlets. There usually aren't nearly enough outlets for the number of people who need power. Heck, when people bring laptops into one-hour meetings in my workplace they are usually jockeying for outlets too.
So, maybe we're seeing a large deployment of "one less wire" networks, but until battery life gets much better, I don't think it's fair to say wireless. Most laptops and pda-type gadgets are lucky to get two hours of "real" usage in the field. By "real" I mean actually using the laptop or gadget on the wireless to surf the internet while, for example, playing music. (Everyone in these coffee shops seems to have headphones plugged into their laptop when I see them.)
Just an observation, not a critique on the article.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Austin's becoming a hot hot spot because it's still a comparatively small city with the likes of New York and such.
Imagine stretching WiFi from the Bronx to JFK Airport, and I don't find it surprising that Austin is so hot. Some small city was bound to become a hot hot spot, and Austin happened to have good luck.
Please do some thinking about how big 1/2 a square mile is. Unless they have built this university up to the stratosphere or down to the earth's core, not sure what .5 sq. mile will do for them!
Not even close. Where'd you come up with a dumbass number like that?
U r a Tard.
im pretty sure UT is larger than .5 square miles :) From north to south it stretches from 19th to 27th street, and east to west is a bit wider than that.
-
dupe?
Don't share bluetooth devices, and don't have sex with them. That should keep you pretty well covered.
UT makes up 90% of Austin? What are you smoking man. I live in an Austin suburb, and UT is big, but it is only a small percentage of the metro. The greater Austin area is over a million people, and UT is about 50 thousand students. Even if you figured there were one faculty/staff per student (which isn't even close), that only comes to 100 thousand directly UT related people, and that is what, 10%? Not only does Austin area have UT, it also has most of the state government of Texas, which employs thousands of people, Dell, which employs over 20 thousand people in the Austin area, a major IBM facility, major facilities from Motorola, AMD and numerous other companies.
Even if you are talking square miles of land, and only talking about the actual city limits of Austin, UT isn't anywhere near to 90% of the city limits of Austin.
If the princetonreview.com figure and the conversion by http://www.onlineconversion.com/area.htm are correct, UT Austin does only have ~.56 square miles (357 acres). Have you been there? Most (nearly all?) of the buildings have basements, some as many as 4 floors down, and there's many, many levels above ground in nearly all of the buildings. UT Austin is not designed like Texas Tech; it's designed to take up a small amount of space. It started as a mere 40 acres, just north of Austin, and has been enveloped by the city. Only a portion of the students live on campus.
I believe it's a somewhat polluted city, so I'd be concerned about WiFi performance. Would WiFi Speed Spray do the trick??
WiFI Speed Spray
If it did, it wouldn't leave much room for the rest of Texas! Texas is 266,807 square miles, Austin is 2,705 square miles in metro areas according to that site.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
San Francisco has a free wi-fi network called SFLan.
SFLan
SFLan node map
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
Its range isn't generally much better than those of nonwireless methods
In my experience, my network cable generally has to be within about 0m of the hub (or "access point", if you will). I hear some wireless technologies these days have broken the zero-metre barrier! Outrageous, I know!
I know you mean University of Texas, but every time I see UT I think of the announcer guy from Unreal Tournament saying "HEADSHOT!"
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
wow what an idiot, the campus is not most of austin any more than your dick is bigger than the size of this period '.'
if by small you mean in the top twenty of cities nation wide (beating, for example, seattle) linky.
Having just moved to the Austin area from Silicon Valley....
:)
Wireless is very popular here because they get more lightning strikes per week than Kali gets in a year! Having everything connected with wires is like playing russian roulette. I'm going to need at least 3 more APC UPS's.
On the upside... The BBQ is excelent, and gas/diesel/rent/food/etc... is cheap.
Exactly. I have a nine year old who has been online for 4 years, has never been hooked to a wire, and likes to surf the net from her bed, prints her homework without a wire. She charges up at night and surfs by day - unwired. It's about freedom and mobility.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
But you want to enjoy surfing the web from the recliner, or while taking a dump, wireless is more then a convient way to access the internet. Go capitalism !!! This is truly the peak of human culture...
Chicken fried steak w/ bisquits and gravey.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
The ECE dept here at Univ Texas-Austin just opened a newly $1.5 million remodeled lab for the Wireless Networking & Communications Group. Austin is moving up the ladder in WiFi. Here's the WNCG webpage: WNCG.
The parent post was not insightful. It was clueless.
bp
Here are some really useful utilities to help design wireless networks and to help plot their approximate coverage areas:
Microwave Radio Path Analysis Generates a terrain profile graph and obstruction report for a microwave radio link between two points
Wireless Network Link Analysis Calculates approximate received power level and fade margins for microwave wireless links
Longley-Rice Path Loss Analysis Generates a image showing the estimated Longley-Rice path loss for a given transmitter location
More utilities are linked from here
..well, maybe.
/do/ manage to find one broadcasting, it's always WEPed. Where's Japan's free WiFi? )-:
I went back to Boston this Spring and found a bunch of un-WEPed base stations around my parents house so I didn't have to worry about internet access.
Over here in Japan, people lock their base stations down -like ALL of them. I've never been able to get on one. When I
i hope you didnt just move here last week (if you did i would understand the lightning remark a little more :)
i wouldnt say theres an above average amount of lightning here...but of course i grew up in southeast texas where the rain never stops!
...and WiFi the Austin Moontowers.
Austin may be small by comparison with NYC but it's a major metro area compared with most places.
Still, your comment made me wonder if wi-fi could be the basis for an economic development model for smaller cities & towns. I wonder if any of the profs at UT are looking at that aspect of the Austin "model"...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Thank god for slashdot, wouldn't have know to tell doug he was in the chronicle. Except that was last weeks issue. And I read it. Anyway, that's Doug on the left in background, on right is Mike. He hasnt' worked there for several months...
For any long range ourdoor uses, 802.11b still kicks g's arse.
G needs higher SNR to work well, and it's coding scheme is more succeptible to interference. Fine for coffee shot or home access, but no good for 20km links.
I would like to mention the MeshAP project by Locust World.
http://www.locustworld.com
Thank you,
-Steve
For those of you interested in wardriving or what's out there, here's a look at Austin Texas from a wardriver's point of view.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
The reason is that most people PREFER not buy power-saving notebooks, which easily sport 7h of battery power... :-)
Your own choice...
Austin also got started on community wireless before it got to be such a huge fad recently. A few indy coffeeshops have been providing free wifi for years now, and AustinWireless has been mapping out locations (intentional and otherwise) since the late 90s.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Dude, unless you have one hell of a setup, there is no way you getting 20 kilometers on a standard retail WAP. Well, unless you live on the salt flats and are made of conductive material.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
This article comes just in time! I bought Linksys WRT54G for my home network and I'm intterested to open it for my fellow net users, BUT. As I have experience in hosting / server administration, I'm concerned of security. Mostly MY security, to prevent my AP becoming a source of spam. I think I should set up firewall to limit smtp-traffic, but what's sufficient? I think the problem is common with other free internet access points / cafes, schools etc. How is it done?
I do know how to set up firewall / routing / bandwidth control, but which rules to use? Any points to good sources of information?
It's actually working out pretty well. Starbucks is getting no draw whatsoever from their wi-fi installations which are run by T-mobile. The locally owned shops like Halcyon, Little City, and Mozart's are packed almost every day with paying customers who drop by to drink coffee, surf, and check their email. Wi-fi costs them little more than their initial installation plus monthly ISP fees, and they draw in more customers.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
This is common in late spring/early summer. Also, early fall as well. Just wait till July and August, your going to wish for nice thunderstorms to keep the area cool. Otherwise, Summer in Austin is that of a fucking desert. I hope you don't drive with black leather seats or you will burn your ass off.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah we are all stuck on Riverside LOL
Calling in from Jefferson Commons at the Ballpark on Pleasant Valley and Elmont...and Wickersham
There already are some in south austin from what I have heard from Zane McCarthy. Can't remeber the places or the name of his company to look that up though. Sorry
If it did, it wouldn't leave much room for the rest of Texas! Texas is 266,807 square miles, Austin is 2,705 square miles in metro areas according to that site.
Yeah, as soon as I saw "Quarter of a million miles" my hands twitched instinctively towards the calculator.
A quarter of a million miles square would be a solid, packed, square-shaped city 5 hundred miles to a side.
That would represent a full day's driving at highway speeds.
Bzzzzzt!
Check your facts before you spout...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
you insensitive clod! ....you crushed sacred slashdot culture.
I'm having difficulty imagining any other kinds of a free wireless network. What exactly does it take to be an FSF-approved wireless network?
Is Wi-Fi big in the states? Just how big?
I'm finding all this coverage a little puzzling.
I haven't heard of a single Wi-Fi hotspot in this country(Ireland).
May the Maths Be with you!
Yes, a desert. A great big, fucking desert where the humidity is really high. Hmm...
This is a great idea. And for those areas of town that don't have moontowers and couldn't get wi-fi access that way, they should implement another idea: put in moon towers all over Austin! It'd be a great way to unify the new/bland suburbs with the unique Austin character that you're more likely to find downtown. They'd have to have them custom-built, I'm sure, but it is totally the one thing that is a unique Austin architectural feature, and it would be a wonderful way to tie together the old and the new parts of the city, which right now are very different.
Here is a nice little article describing moon towers, by the way, for those who aren't familiar: link #1, link #2, link #3.
There is a UK variant of the software described that has been up and running for a while.
http://www.locustworld.com/
I've not compared the two solutions.
That Austin is over 1% of Texas (according to that site) is pretty impressive.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Nope. Grey cloth. But the paint is dark blue.
I'm OK with the heat. In Kali I lived in the far east SF bay, which IS a desert in the summer. No rain, no humidity, just hot. What gets me here is the UV. It's enough of a latitude change that the UV numbers are really up there. I can sunburn in about 15 minutes at noon here.
We had a commute train called "ACE" that ran a reasonable route for me, and had both WiFi onboard, as well as UoP MBA classes. The rail project they're trying here doesn't seem very promising.
Move to Austin and crash w/ a friend.
Apply for UT or ACC get admitted.
Grow a pony tail.
Get a job at HEB or Fiesta or Central
Market.
Wear a belly pack.
Get a Student Loan (2k).
By a cheapo laptop and used bike.
Default your loan.
Get your own place in the crappy
side of town (East I-35).
Finally get your back pack, your belly
pack wait 3 hrs for the dillo bus
down town. Go to cafe on South Congress.
Go to the bathroom and change your sweat
drenched shirt and remove the fire ant
that's been chewing your skin inside your
sock all the way from Ben White.
Finagle an AC outlet. Log-On to Slashdot
and brag about Austin is intensity in
ten cities..cool dude!
Buy Chai tea with the last dollar
til payday(bring extra bag for refill).
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
This is just great. More reason for people to come to an already over-cramped city whose administrations over the years never had foresight to build an infrastructure to handle the masses.
Those things are going to boost demand like huge... everyone with a DS will be in Starbucks 24/7 chatting online and drawing pictures to each other, playing LAN Zelda or whatever, and the PSP guys can talk to... well, just the guys at Starbucks I guess... about the latest movies that they... rebought... for their PSP... umm... so they can watch 2F2F at Starbucks...
I know you can only put so many people on an WAP, and big NY building probably mess with the signal. But I bet Austin has a lot more land to cover than NYC does.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
And yeah, the rail is intended for cross-county service which, given our demographics, layout, etc., makes a lot more sense. (Feel free to drop me a mail or telnet into silverchat.com[local austinite bbs chat thingy] if you wanna chat about it -- getting kinda off-topic here :)
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
I'll wait until an equally cool project comes to a state that isn't so fucked up.
I'm counting the minutes until the bigots mod this down.
Interesting story Chronicle, but the old editor Lewis Black has them a few years behind the times, plus he is one of the bigger jerks in town. Austin has been a wifi hotspot for years. The Chronicle needs to stick at making stuff up about George Bush, that is what they are good at.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
The City and APD have already committed to enforcing it.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
i've lived in austin about 4 years, and it's a great city in general. the wireless is nice. some friends and i participarted this last weekend in a road rally where a lot of the clues were easier to answer with the internet available. we were careening around the city with 2 laptops in the car moving from hotspot to hotspot (spiderhouse, the public library, manuel's, etc.). it was a lot of fun.
The players tried to take the field. The marching band refused to yield...
Heh, I suppose you have a point. But I'm originally from Houston. Now THAT'S a city that feels like your living in a sauna.
Life is not for the lazy.
http://www.hometech.com/power/wallwart.html#GC-CAM YAF1
:)
...)
If you spot someone with a laptop hooked up to an outlet, ask politely if you can share it, and supply one of these splitters
I have a few of the non-splitting variety, useful for getting full use of a powerstrip. (And often that has the same happy result if you're looking for a spot at a coffeeshop, namely un-blocking an outlet
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
People in Austin complain about 'really high' humidity when it breaks 50%. Where I used to live (upper midwest) if it was over 90F out, it was over 90% humidity. People from Texas seem to think the midwest isn't humid. But they forget that up north it actually rains frequently during the summer. Plus up there they have this stuff called 'topsoil' which holds in the moisture (and then the sun bakes it out slowly). Plus actual ponds and lakes that aren't artificial. But mostly I think it is the different types of vegetation. Around Austin a 100 year Oak tree is a scrawny little thing. In more wet climates a 100 year Oak is freaking huge. Austin, while not a true desert like west Texas/New Mexico/Arizona/Nevada, compared to the upper midwest is dry in the summer. Now if you were talking Houston or Galveston, yeah, they've got the high temps and truly high humidity, due to the gulf and due to the fact they have better topsoil and more vegetation. I couldn't take summers along the gulf coast, but Austin doesn't really feel any hotter than what I grew up with. A good deal to basically not have any winter. And yes, Austinites actually think it is cold when it is under 40F. That isn't 'winter' as I grew up with it, its like late fall or early spring.
I combined several lists from various sites for one, big master list of Austin free wireless locations.
I'm sure there are tons more. But this should keep you going for a while. Who knew we had so many coffee shops? This message spans two posts, due to too few characters per line. This is post #1/2.
Every Schlotzsky's sandwich shop
Austin Convention Center
Triumph Cafe
Little City (2)
Alamo Drafthouse (3)
Spiderhouse
Halcyon
Cafe Mundi
The HIdeout
Several auto service waiting areas
Several car wash waiting areas
UT (you don't have to be a paying student; you just have to have a UT EID)
Austin Libraries
Amy's Ice Cream
Aussie's Bar & Grill
BD Riley's Irish Pub
Chili's
Common Grounds Coffeehouse
Copacabana Coffehouse
Jo's Coffee (I think)
Crimson Restaurant
Curra's Grill
The Daily Grind
The Dog and Duck Pub
Flightpath Coffeehouse
Hooter's
Joy of Austin Gentleman's Club
Austin Java Company
JP's Java
La Tazza Fresca
Lava Java
Mimosa Cafe
Mojo's
New World Deli
Opal Divines Freehouse
Quack's 43rd Street Bakery
Quality Seafood Market
Resistencia Bookstore
Ruta Maya
Saradora's Coffeehouse and Emporium
Shoal Creek Saloon
Scholz Garten downtown
Seattle's Best Coffee (3)
Texpresso (2)
Threadgill's
Trianon (3)
Uno's Cafe
Ventana Del Soul
Xpresso Lube
The Yellow Rose Gentleman's Club
Lanz Sport
Carousel Pediatric
Antonio's
Bobee Coffee Shop
BookPeople
Dear California transplant,
Please turn your ass around and go back to the wasteland from whence you came.