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http://www.fon.com/en - go on, they're only €15.
I've got one and, while it's doesn't yet have the coverage of some providers, the more people who share their WiFi, the better.
..actually - that's a lie. I used to use my phone as a modem. At least this way things are easier.
Definately Vodafone dongle thingummyjigs are the way to go - never ever pay for hotel internet access
I use a Dell D430 and the performance from the internal card is great. Only possible downside is that you need to remove the laptop's battery before you can change the SIM card.
Now the shameless plug (I'm the CTO): You can use Whisher to share your WiFi without having to pay €15 for a new box. Why add another WiFi signal that you don't need when you can share your existing one?
Also, Whisher gives you per-minute access on over 60k commercial hotspots (for example BT OpenZone), so if you don't use it, you don't pay. If you use two minutes, you pay two minutes - no minimum session times, or monthly fees. As a launch promotion we're giving away €20 of free WiFi Out credit for people to try the service.
http://www.whisher.com/freewifi - just visit this link, create your account and install the plugin to start using Whisher.
We don't have any information yet as we are trying to keep things simple for the majority of people, but I'm working on a technical section for those interested in knowing what goes on under the hood. The gist of it is that we are transparently and securely sharing the encryption keys of the shared WiFi signals. When you share your WiFi, we redistribute your encryption key to the other Whisher clients, which in turn store it encrypted for use when needed. Thus, the client applies the key, and your visitors never even see it.
If you want to temporarily stop sharing (for example you want all your bandwidth to download a heavy file) you can enable private mode either from the plugin, or from the My Account section on our website. This will kick out all the visitors that may currently be connected. In previous versions we had a third mode which was 'Buddies only', in which you decided with whom you shared your WiFi in a buddy-list style, and we will bring this back once we are confident users understand how the system works.
Thanks for that - even something at that level would be useful to understand on the site.
Does the client take any steps to control visitors to a network (access to other hosts on the network / bandwidth throttling / content filtering / logging etc) or is it pure key-sharing?
Ben
WiFi hotspots are a mess. Sure it's nice when you get faster than 3.5G speeds and don't have to worry about a fair use limit, but the whole (often unsuccessful) process involved isn't worth it when it's free and certainly isn't when you have to pay!