If you were lucky enough to buy your iPhone in North America, chances are you not only pay less for the privellage of owning one, you’ll be able to access free wi-fi in a lot of places.
AT&T announced that over 17,000 free wireless hotspots have been activated for iPhone users. They have a tool that allows you to find there free wi-fi spots. Admittedly many of them are in Starbucks or McDonalds, there are a number of airports that offer it too. I could handle sitting in Starbucks with a cup of joe for free wi-fi (remember it’s free and faster than 3G), but McDonalds, I think not.
Our biggest Telco, Telecom, provides wireless hotspots, only thing is you have to pay for them. How blimmin archaic. Other places you can buy and hours access – yippie (not).
But this is also the official AT&T offering. In Vancouver where I lived for a while last year, nearly every cafe I could find had a sign offering free wi-fi, or if there wasn’t a sign it was still there for you to use. How lucky was I that the best coffee shop in Vancouver Agro Cafe offered free wi-fi. Not only was the coffee spectacular, the wi-fi free but the atmosphere was awesome to just sit, enjoy the coffee and surf the web. Now with iPhone I wouldn’t have even bothered taking the laptop down, full Safari browser over wi-fi is just great.
Fast forward to here and now in New Zealand, and I just don’t understand why cafe’s don’t offer free wi-fi. I mean I spent a lot of time in cafes doing my work and of course eating their food and chugging down their cups of joe. I mean how many cafes would be open at midnight sunday with at least 20 people in all eating and drinking? Well this was common at Waves in Vancouver, as many overseas students were all on free wi-fi catching up with folk across the world. Me, well I was listening to Super 14 or something equally silly.
So why no wi-fi in New Zealand
2 Comments
June 19, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Some public libraries in NZ offer free WiFi (probably over 100 locations, last count).
http://zoomin.co.nz/?search/tag/apn+free+wifi
July 18, 2009 at 2:32 am
I have made a map of all the current free wifi locations in NZ at http://jahoog.org/wifi , not as much as there should be, but slowly growing.