Paris moves ahead with free Wi-Fi plans

Free city-wide Wi-Fi coverage in San Francisco won't go to the vote until November, but Paris is already moving ahead with its free Wi-Fi plans, opening almost 400 hot spots in public places around the city in mid-July, with a second wave planned for September.

With Wi-Fi access springing up everywhere, though, the problem is finding it. Chief among the obstacles is that Paris is altogether too wired.

Sure, there are a couple of hundred Parisian Foneros and almost 150 cafés offering free Wi-Fi listed at cafes-wifi.com. Jiwire has over 300 free hotspots around Paris in its database, and lots more sites where local Internet service provider Ozone offers outdoor service to its subscribers for free: and the French capital is abuzz with open Wi-Fi hotspots.

But there are also tens of thousands of homes with ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connections, most of them using the all-in-one modem-routers with built in wireless access distributed by their ISPs (Internet service providers). Picking out the open hotspot signals among all that competing noise is no easy matter.

From our apartment on the East side of Paris, for instance, I can "see" over a dozen Wi-Fi hotspots, most of them carrying the default SSIDs provided by the ISPs. Theoretically, I ought to be able to connect to a Fonero living in the building across the street, but I've had no luck so far. And while Ozone wrote to tell me that our building is within its coverage area, I've yet to pick up the Ozone signal.

There's also an ad-hoc (computer-to-computer) connection called "orange." That SSID is also used by one of the mobile phone networks for its Wi-Fi service, but their nearest advertised base station is over 300 meters away, far too distant for me to pick up at home, so I suspect someone is fishing for the passwords of unsuspecting surfers.

Out and about, there are other challenges. Wandering the streets with an expensive laptop in one hand while clicking repeatedly on "Refresh network list" with the other as I scan for signals strikes me as a sure way to lose the laptop. What's needed is some other way of finding these hotspots.

One way to highlight their presence, war-chalking ( making chalk-marks on walls and pavements to indicate a nearby Wi-Fi base-station), was a short-lived media sensation that never caught on with the laptop-toting general public.

Better, then, to consult the databases of open hotspots published by the different operators on their Web sites.

Once you've left home or the office, there's a chicken-and-egg element to this: you need Internet access to check out those online directories, but you need the directories to find the Internet access. If you can solve that puzzle, then a wealth of detail awaits you. Cafes-Wifi.com and Fon use Google Maps to plot hotspot locations, Fon tagging them with their exact street address, while Jiwire uses Microsoft MapPoint. The Paris city authority has chosen to use its own cartographic service, Paris à la Carte.