I'm happy to announce the reintroduction of open WiFi into my neighbourhood. Emanating from Reinvented World Headquarters here at 100 Prince St. is a WiFi beam stretching out onto Prince Street and right into St. Paul's Anglican Church. The usefulness of the WiFi for religious purposes remains to be seen, but if you're in need of a quick net hit while driving or walking up or down Prince Street, you're welcome to grab our signal.

Here's a rough map showing the footprint of the signal. The WiFi router (a NetGear MR814) is sitting in the lower west side of 100 Prince Street, near the outside wall. Signal strength is good up and down Prince Street from about Richmond almost all the way to the corner of Grafton, and across the greenspace between the St. Paul's Church and the Church Hall over Church Street and onto the lawn in front of the Coles Building. Your mileage may vary; testing done with an iBook.

I picked up the NetGear router for $69 (net price, after rebates) at FutureShop. Installation was dead simple: I plugged the [included] Ethernet cable into the "Internet" port on the back of the NetGear, and plugged the other end into the switch that is, in turn, connected to my main pipe to the Internet. Then I turned on my laptop, and found a WiFi connection with SSID "Wireless" waiting for me to configure using a browser: this was as simple as assigning a new admin password, a new SSID, and setting up the static IP address, netmask and gateway.

The SSID of the configured router is ReinventedOpen. You'll find another SSID in the same space, ReinventedClosed, which is a closed, WEP-keyed router we're using for internal purposes.

Your IP address when you're here will be 142.177.254.146.

The world owes a debt of thanks to Dan James for this hotspot: I was running here last summer, and shut things down for both lack of use, and because I wanted to use our original WAP as a router. Dan challenged me to open things back up by suggesting that if everyone thought as me, we wouldn't have WiFi anywhere. So here's hoping a million flowers bloom.