Today I had an appointment to meet a business associate in a local coffee shop. Now I have known all along that there are wifi hotspots in places like Starbucks, McDonalds, and many hotels but I was not ready for what I found today.



When I fired up my laptop I mostly wanted to take notes about our meeting, but by chance the wifi radar leapt into action and suddenly I found myself connected to a wifi hotspot. I quickly turned over to the Network Manager that had connected to the wi-fi spot and found that it had connected to a "free" wifi spot with an SSID of "SouthernOcean". My mail updated and several other things leapt into action as my laptop does when connected to my local spot at home.

When the meeting finished I searched to see who or what "SouthernOcean" is and found next to nothing about it online. The only reference I could find was another user like myself in Melbourne (about 10 hours drive away from my home in Sydney) who also found in Melbourne and also in Adelaide in South Australia a wireless hotspot similarly named "Southern Ocean".

Next I went looking to see if there are any directories telling me where hotspots are to be found in the cities of Australia, and what I found were directories of hotspots around the world. The first you should visit is Boingo - they list there 402 hotspots in Australia, 11,755 in United Kingdom, 12,516 in South Korea, and 6,083 in USA.

There are others to go to: wifi411, a list of free hotspots around the world at wififreespot, and Free-hotspot.com.

Happy hunting! There are lots more hotspots un-announced in the world too. So it is always a good idea to start your machine up and go hunting to see what comes up in your radar where you are.