Sign in / up

back to article City slickers get another 5 years of free Wi-Fi

The City of London has extended its deal with The Cloud for blanket Wi-Fi coverage, including the offer of 15 minutes of free access intended to lure surfers into paying £2 for a day pass. The service has been running since 2007, provided by The Cloud and covering just about all of the Square Mile that makes up the City of …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    :)

    while true; do ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 hw ether `xxd -l 6 -p /dev/random | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'`; ifconfig eth0 up; sleep 900; done

    8 0
    1. Miek
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      easier sed than done.

      8 0
      1. Lockwood
        Reply Icon

        MAN that pun was awful. Get a GREP on reality or else I will mercilessly beat you with a CAT.

        4 0
      2. Paul_Murphy
        Reply Icon

        That's not too..

        AWKward - just a bit of typing after all.

        ttfn

        1 0
    2. Paul_Murphy
      Reply Icon

      I might have a bash at that later, or at least C if I can get it working.

      sorry :-)

      0 0
    3. MacGyver
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      (:

      No, no, have it start from a MAC from something crazy like:

      000855xxxxxx NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center

      0000AFxxxxxx NUCLEAR DATA INSTRUMENTATION

      00C063xxxxxx MORNING STAR TECHNOLOGIES, INC

      0023C5xxxxxx Radiation Safety and Control Services Inc

      000055xxxxxx COMMISSARIAT A L`ENERGIE ATOM.

      000555xxxxxx Japan Cash Machine Co., Ltd.

      000A2Bxxxxxx Etherstuff

      0050C2473xxx Sensus Metering Systems Israel

      0006CFxxxxxx Thales Avionics In-Flight Systems, LLC

      That way when they do up their weekly usage slides, you can picture someone trying to figure out how Japanese ATMs and airplanes are using the network.

      0 0
  2. Peter Galbavy
    FAIL

    Yeah, right

    You need those 15 minutes of free to try to wade through the registration process. And then it (session management) doesn't work on an out-of-the-box Android browser anyway. I gave up a long time ago.

    Helpfully it did tell me that the Cloud's commercial service was not for me.

    1 0
  3. jonathanb Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Slight correction?

    Have a very large working population (about 260,000 people) in a small area. St Davids, Wells, Ely etc are very small cities, but I'm not sure it would work so well there, because their daytime population is roughly the same as the night time population.

    0 0
  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Free is not free

    Can we re-address the definition of free.

    I have never been able to get 'free' wifi in the UK due to the laborious registration process which frequently fails (vodafone and BT springs to mind).

    The Cloud services seem to allow me to connect but don't offer the registration page, making it pretty useless.

    Lastly, none of them like me using openDNS.

    If i am giving you my email address and name and you then use that to market at me, then i have paid albeit with something other than money but you can get money elsewhere by 'monetising' your data.

    I recently spent some time in Vietnam where there is fast FREE internet all over the place. No registration, no sign up to offers from our partners... just free.

    5 0
    1. Paul_Murphy
      Reply Icon

      >Vietnam where there is fast FREE internet all over the place.

      I don't think it's fair to compare a first world and third world country in such narrow terms as just free wi-fi.

      After all we have the NHS - that must compensate at least a little.

      ttfn

      0 1
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Free WiFI?

    I've not even been able to log into uk cloud free wifi in McDonalds or Little Chef. The registration process fails (Linux). The original McDonalds uk system worked, it must have been improved. Nothing works at Heathrow IME. However Panera and Caribou work well in the US.

    The UK is a wifi free zone as far as I can tell!! Greed certainly deters the potential customers.

    1 0
  6. Sean Hamilton
    Megaphone

    wireless site survey

    Hope you will find it interesting:

    Free WiFi Site Survey Software for Mac http://www.netspotapp.com/

    0 0
  7. Pisnaz

    You know, for a small city that was in other areas behind times, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada has had wifi coverage since around 2003. Granted at the time they had a great provincial Telco and sadly it has not expanded since, but when I lived there it was dirt simple to go to town, open the laptop and with none of the hassle of hotels or pay wifi you were on and connected at reasonable speeds.

    It was so handy and just seamless it still amazes me when I go places and have nothing but a hassle or get asked to pay for wifi connections.

    http://www.fred-ezone.ca/

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like