LivSimpl

How to: find free wifi in your area

Need to find a Wifi hotspot in your area? Perhaps the better question is, do you need to know if there’s a Wifi hotspot where you’re going? Jiwire is a great resource for just that. Take today for example.

I was on location for a television commercial we were shooting (when I’m not working on LivSimpl, hanging out with my family, volunteering, or being an assistant manager of our apartment complex, I’m a full-time copywriter at an ad agency). If you’ve ever been involved with filming anything, you know that there is a LOT of down time. Last night I jumped on Jiwire to see if there’d be a wireless signal where we were shooting. Sure enough, there were two availabe: one paid and one free.

As you can see from the above screen shot, Salt Lake isn’t exactly bustling with hotspots like other, larger cities. Knowing I’d have wireless access ahead of time helped me to plan my day more efficiently, communicate with some folks back at the office who were then able to e-mail me projects to work on. So instead of sitting around for a few hours before we actually started filming, I was able to get some work done and come home afterward instead of going back into the office.

This is an ideal solution for those who travel, even if it’s within their own city, as was the case with me. It’s also user-generated so you can submit locations they don’t have listed. In addition, they have a free app for the iPhone and widgets for both Windows and Mac.

I know there are quite a few other sites out there that offer similar services. Does anyone have any experiences/recommendations? Please let us know in the comments.

LivSimpl

Please subscribe to LivSimpl! Control + click here or paste the following into your feed reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/livsimpl.

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Tech, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.