Free Sydney Wireless - SydneyFreeNet

Free wifi on the Manly Ferry

From tomorrow June 21, you can get free wifi on the Sydney Manly ferry service. The service is limited to 30 minutes or 30MB, which nowadays really isn’t that much, especially with those annoying auto-playing video ads on some news sites. The service is provided by Tomizone. You connect your device to the tomizone@sydneyferries access [...]

Deploying long-distance Wifi in Haiti

Inveneo has a great case study about setting up long-distance Wifi in earthquake hit Haiti, which in short boils down to: 1. Wifi Network Design: make sure your nodes are visible to each other and pointing at the right location 2. Location Capacity Survey: confirming the location can support a network node 3. Wifi Hub [...]

Mifi portable Wifi

Internode last month introduced the Mifi in Australia. Mifi is a personal, portable, 3G mobile broadband Wifi access point. It allows for up to 5 devices to connect over Wifi at the same time, and the battery should last for 4 hours. It’s an easy and fast solution for setting up a personal Wifi bubble, [...]

FON smart wifi router tweets its status

While Meraki switched course a while ago, increasing their prices, using buzz words like “enterprise” and “cloud computing”, and stopped innovating, FON introduces a smart 802.11n wifi router for 79 EUR (about 133 AUD – Meraki’s MR11 802.11n router is 599 USD/689 AUD). It’s not just a n-wifi router, it offers some cool features you’d [...]

Laptop friendly cafes, or not

A nice overview of laptop friendly cafes, for Sydney and a couple of other global cities, indicating if they offer free laptop powerups, public wifi and have any 3G connectivity. Check out the Sydney locations, and vote on your favourite. Having said that, some cafes, at least in the US/New York, are feeling the GFC [...]

Meshing cars on the grid

Wired’s Autopia has a great article on Robin Chase (of World Resource Institute, Zipcar) on mashing up the electric grid with cars and mesh networks: “The Grid, Our Cars and the Net: One Idea to Link Them All“. It explains what a smart electricity grid is and how cars fit in as network nodes to [...]

New Fonera 2 product

Wired has an overview of the new Fonera 2, to be introduced in Europe April 21st, for 50 Euro (94 $AUD), supporting for networked storage and automatic downloads (and YouTube uploads) in addition to its internet-sharing capabilities. That’s a lot of functionality for a little price. Interesting to see what the telcos think of this. [...]

New year, new product releases. And a challenge.

Meraki has released a new, powerful 802.11n router, the MR58, targetted at businesses (with a price tag to match). It’s an outdoors version, has three 802.11n radios, five antennas. Meraki: “The MR58 can also be used to create long distance mesh links as far as 20 km with optional antennas.” The folks over at Open-Mesh [...]

Apple + Unwired?

AppleInsider has a story on an Apple Australia package in the AU store which supposedly is a wireless bundle with Unwired. Unwired is the wireless ISP offering the uConnect free wifi service across Sydney. Unwired is also one of the slowest ways to connect wirelessly, and only available in metro areas. I wonder why Apple [...]

Free Wifi at Sydney Twestival

Tonight’s free Wifi at Sydney Twestival (at 19:30, Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford St, Paddington, NSW 2021) is brought to you by Unwired’s uConnect. “Twestival participants can bring their laptop or mobile devices and continue to tweet through the night on the Unwired wireless connection.” Enjoy, I’d say! a