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Peter Cochrane's Video Blog: Escaping expensive wi-fi

From £15 per day to nearly free...

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By Peter Cochrane on 16 August 2007 12:16

In this video blog, Peter Cochrane explains why a Cardiff hotel lost his business - and how easy it is to find cheap internet access.

Peter Cochrane

Peter Cochrane is an engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, futurist and consultant. He is the former CTO and Head of Research at BT, with a career in telecoms and IT spanning over 40 years. Peter has also held a number of prominent academic positions including the UK's first Professor for the public Understanding of Science and Technology. For more about Peter, see www.cochrane.org.uk.

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Comments

There are 3 comments. Join the discussion

  1. 1. anonymous

    With phishers using wifi in public places, how about a "how to find better and safe wifi deals" article?

    • 20 August 2007 17:39
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  2. 2. Mike McNamara

    Peter,

    Another excellent post. The WiFi charges seem have taken over from the high charges that hotels used to charge for phone calls until mobiles wiped that out.

    Relating this to another of your posts, I expect it's an inexperienced 'Manager' that made the decision who has no experience of what 'value for money' really means.

    • 21 August 2007 15:27
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  3. 3. Paul Mansfield

    using any internet connection, whether in the office, at home, on wire or wireless is vulnerable to security problems when you are not using an encrypted channel. Sure, public wifi is a real no-no.

    ...sniffing passwords for pop3 or imap, catching cookies for logins to webmail or ebay, catching logins on non-https websites...

    the answer is to (1) clear all your cookies before you browse the net, do not login to any non-https site, or even https sites which bounce you back to a non-http site with a cookie. (2) use only ssl-secured mail (s-imap [tcp993], s-pop3 etc) (3) use a VPN to a trusted place.

    also, of course, ensure your firewall is turned on - many people leave it off when they are on a corporate network so file sharing etc work, but the windows one doesn't understand different network profiles properly.

    • 21 August 2007 22:37
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