This post brought to you by “wow”
(Wireless over water) If you’ve woken from a deep coma, I should tell you that some months ago, everyone was talking about the wifi service on some of the ferries in our ferry system. It’s started out as a free wifi point, but they do intend to charge for it, so I decided that I’d venture out on the Seattle/Bainbridge route today to see how easy it is for me, a relatively untechy person, to access and use their site.
As we waited in the line to board the ferry, I pulled out my laptop to give it a whirl, and found 3 unsecured (and 1 secured) points to choose from. Choosing the mobilisa option eventually did the trick, although they did force me to create a free user account first and then give them my email address to “confirm” within 3 days (or else face, gasp, deletion). Handy hint: hey, how about calling that one the “WSDOT Ferry wifi point”?
As the car moved towards the ferry, I lost connection several times, but chalked that up to the fact that I was still boarding after all. But as we moved away from shore, that tasty 54Mbps faltered and dropped to a mere 12 Mbps. Of course, I don’t really care what that means. The number just went down, is all.
Well, free is free, and all is good, but even as I finish typing this blog, the Bainbridge Island shore looms close. Can anyone possibly want to pay in order to get half an hour of wireless for the trip?
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Well, if you make the trip twice a day five time a week and try to stay on top of 250 RSS feeds you, like me, might be willing to pay :-).
not to be dense, but why wouldn’t you just refresh your rss reader at home, and wade through what you can on the ferry? Unless you happen to subscribe to particularly sucky feeds that require you to download or visit the site at the time of the reading, of course. But I imagine with 250 feeds there might be some leeway ;).
I guess I would pay a buck for 30 minutes — at least, now that I’m all set up. Sure hope there’s a commuter frequent-user option for you, Mike.