WiFi Charlottetown

A few open wifi points in Charlottetown

Steven Garrity — 2004-06-20T15:53:00-03:00

Our friend Jevon MacDonald has posted a summary of some open wifi access points around Charlottetown:

Cedars Eatery (81 University Ave.)
The Formosa Tea House (186 Prince St.)
Timothy's Coffee Shop (137B Kent St.)
Mavors (downstairs, Confederation Center of the Arts)
Atlantic Technology Center (90 University Ave.)

Free wifi at Babbas Lounge

Steven Garrity — 2004-03-22T11:38:00-04:00

A local favourite restaurant and bar, Babbas Lounge, is now offering free wifi.

Babbas Lounge above Cedars Eatery at 81 University Ave. in Charlottetown. It is home to fine trivia on Sunday nights, and great music on most weekends.try the Chicken Shawarma.

Thanks for the wifi!

More WiFi on Prince Street

Steven Garrity — 2003-08-28T21:42:00-03:00

There’s a new open hotspot on Price Street between Fitzroy and Euston. It’s roughly across from the YMCA and next door to the First Baptist Church. This is in addition to the access point at 100 Prince Street.

The SSID is WiFiCharlottetown.org. Thanks to Isaac G.

ISN WiFi Hotspot on Kent Street

Peter Rukavina — 2003-06-30T00:00:00-03:00

Island Services Network has turned on an open Wifi hotspot in their third-floor offices above the old Home Hardware location on Kent Street between Queen and University, next door to Tim Hortons. You can see evidence of this if you sit near the front of Timothy's down the street -- SSID ISN1 will appear faintly if you've got a good WiFi antenna in your laptop.

WiFi for God: New Hotspot on Prince Street

Peter Rukavina — 2003-06-23T23:10:00-03:00

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.

A Prime Example: WiFi at Timothy’s Coffee Shop

Steven Garrity — 2003-06-11T14:42:00-03:00

WiFi is better experienced than explained. Timothy’s coffee shop on Kent Street in Charlottetown is bathed in an open wireless access signal. Come by, enjoy the fine coffee and sandwiches, and browse the web and check your email. We’re sitting there right now.

We’re adding a running list of known locations with open wifi access in Charlottetown. Let us know if you know of a location that we should add to the list.

Sputnik Setup Update

Steven Garrity — 2003-06-01T15:58:00-03:00

Our Sputnik access points and software have arrived. We’re still working on getting them setup and tested. When we do get them working, though, we’ll be looking for a couple of locations around Charlottetown where we can put our first open access points. We’d like your help in finding appropriate locations.

A few things to consider:

A good location to use WiFi – is it somewhere that people can actually sit and use a computer? Cafés, restaurants, libraries, etc. are good for this.
Can we get a broadband internet connection to it? Locations that already have a connection would be ideal.
Can we get permission to put the access point there? Do you know someone in a good location that won’t mind us sticking a box in their attic window?

Some of us will be at the upcoming weblogger meeting at the Formosa Tea House (Wednesday, June 4th, 1PM). Among other things, we hope to discuss appropriate locations for our wifi hotspots.

Anyone who is interested in getting involved, please let us know.

Charlottetown Wifi Map

Dan James — 2003-05-16T15:11:00-03:00

This map is a few months old but serves as a good starting point. The map shows all open wifi networks. We’ll be working over the next few weeks to bring out updated maps [map has been updated as of May 18,2003].

A few points we should mention:

This map is generated by driving about and detecting wifi points in conjunction with a GPS receiver. When the software detects a wifi access point it logs it with longitude and latitude coordinates. Each red dot you see is where the software detected one or more access points.
While it looks like Parkdale (the right side of the map) has no access points, it is actually because we have not had a chance to map the area.

If you know of locations of points that aren’t obviously here please reply and let us know there whereabouts and we’ll do our best to map them.

First Post!

Steven Garrity — 2003-05-16T13:32:00-03:00

We’re just getting started here and we’ve got a few things happening:

What the heck is this?
WiFiCharlottetown.org (this website) is all setup and should provide a central resource for WiFiCharlottetown info and discussion.
Hardware is on the way! We have ordered a few Sputnik access points to experiment with them as an option for easily manageable access points for people to share WiFi from their homes. We’ll post here when they arrive.
Maps! Our resident war-driver has taken a spin around town with his laptop and GPS receiver. We don’t have anything worth showing yet, but we hope to have some maps up soon.