How would we get access to the location of Public Wifi hotspots?

[chrisbeaman]

The city doesn't yet have a map of public wifi hotspots. This is a dataset that we've talked about having in the Frontier app. Make a list of ideas for how we (or the city) might get this data.

[Nedlinin]

No idea as to what their partnering process is like but wefi has a relatively decent database for public Wifi and even categorises it based on where it may be at (for instance a book icon for a Bookstore).

http://www.wefi.com/contact-request

Might be worth getting into contact with those guys.

Otherwise, we could do it the old fashioned way and bring back a team of wardrivers :) 👍

Edit: Another (free) possibility is https://wigle.net/wiki/index.cgi?API though their API appears to be a bit lackluster.

[chrisbeaman]

Thanks for the suggestions, Chris. I wrote to WEFI - we'll see what they say.

WiGLE's API may be spotty, but their map is pretty cool and shows a lot of wifi hotspots around Huntsville: https://wigle.net/. I wonder how many are recently updated/open?

Personally, I would be open to wardriving. I'm in a funny situation because I canceled carrier service on my smartphone, which means my smartphone is wifi-only. I also don't have internet access at home. As such, I am constantly driving to places like McDonalds and Target to camp outside in my car and leech their wifi. There are many businesses like these that offer Free Wifi (though, it is not completely Open Wifi).

As far as Frontier is concerned, the scenarios where a user might need wifi could include 1) my situation (very rare), 2) having a laptop and looking for a place to work (much more common), 3) having a big file needed to be sent and needing a fast wifi network to do so (less common). Thus, what might be most valuable to the most people is less a network of truly Open Wifi networks but rather Free Wifi networks.

[chrisbeaman]

The City of Huntsville seems to have an API for public wifi hotspots already. Not sure how populated it is: http://maps.huntsvilleal.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Layers/PublicWiFiHotspots/MapServer