wifi

Massport has announced today that they are offering free Wifi for the next two years! Since Thanksgiving, WiFi access has been free at Logan and other airports around the country due to a sponsorship deal with Google to provide the access for free that only required you to click past a splash page announcing Google's sponsorship.

The two months showed a sixfold increase in usage at Logan according to Massport and they wanted to follow up on that by continuing the program with other sponsorship.

Mass. High Tech reports on Openairboston, the non-profit trying to build a citywide public WiFi network.

The effort initially focused on traditional wireless access points (like the ones you can see on lightpoles all over Brookline), but organizers realized that would prove impossibly expensive and so are now using a "mesh" approach, in which each subscriber's computer is essentially equipped to act as an access point through a cheapo router. The result: Free WiFi in parts of the Fenway.

Here's a good reason to secure your wireless internet. Hari Balakrishnan and Samuel Madden have been helping themselves to your WiFi to collect traffic data, a lucrative commercial field. They've been doing it for more than a year, rather than pay for internet connectivity like everyone else.

Well, Grove Hall and Dudley Square, at any rate: $9.95 a month for wireless access, in the first phase of Tom Menino's citywide wireless effort.