Wayne.B wrote:

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:38:37 +0100, Markus Baertschi
wrote:


You will not find a single best provider for the whole of Europe and
interconnect charges are excessively high. The EC did have to regulate
to cap the most excessive rates, but you still want to use a national
provider in each country.


In the US there is widespread availability of WiFi internet. What
about Europe?

Plenty of it out there, mostly ****ing expensive.
Typically $2 - $4 per hour at current exchange rates and often really
slow and badly implemented. You *may* do better if you are in the same
place for several months. Then there's free wifi. Unless you stumble
upon a public spirited or just plain stupid resident with an open
domestic AP, its worth what you paid for it, Watch ~1 minute of ads for
5 mins access or have to renew your ip address every 5 minutes. Various
coffee shop & pub wifis out there. Need the day's (or hour's) voucher
'free' with your drink though.

Affordable Broadband packages over here are nearly all download capped,
rate limited, port blocked or over-contended. This has a knock-on
effect on grass roots open wifi.

I've got a decent cantennae and can typically get 10 access points in
any non rural location. Open ones are running at maybe 2%-3% of them.
The open APs are usually swamped by secured ones running high bandwidth
P2P stuff on the same channel and multipath bouncing off all the masts.
Approximately 1/3 of ports I visited last summer that I got the
computer out in had *some* free wifi. Thats over about 1000 NM around
the southern North Sea. I'm not even counting 'not a hope, just marshes
and a house or two on the horizon' harbours.

--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
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