Bye Bye, Wi-Fi
But it still bummed me out when I heard that MetroFi is ending their "free wireless" service for the city of Portland. The idea was wonderful, the execution was lacking. I tried. From my SE Portland neighborhood, I had "MetroFi" pop up on as an available wireless network on my machine, though it never seemed to actually deliver. Were you ever able to connect to their network? And if so, was it reliable enough to use for more than just a few minutes?
We're not the only city that got our hopes up about having free Wi-Fi. MetroFi's other projects in California and Illinois are also kaput.
Luckily, there are plenty of resources for finding free Wi-Fi hotspots in the city. Try WiFipdx, locate a place to hunker down, and take a minute let these generous businesses know you appreciate what they're doing.
Comments
Portland is crawling with wifi networks, something 2500 per square mile. MetroFi was only ever going to install about 25 per square mile. So that means there are about 100 access points for every device MetroFi deployed.
The Personal Telco Project sees a tremendous opportunity for free wifi in Portland, but only if some of those 100 other networks per square mile decides to join Personal Telco in sharing them with their community. It’s not that hard. Personal Telco is here to help.
Ask not what Free Wifi can do for you, ask what you can do for Free Wifi.
When I moved to Portland a year ago, I found my apartment’s back window had a direct eye-line to a MetroFi node. I picked up a USB adapter and a long cable at a local shop and put it in the window and tada! Free high speed Internet, and full speed just as advertised.
The ads were only mildly annoying, and even online gaming worked fine.
By about January it had degraded to a point that gaming wasn’t working. By March I could barely get Gmail to load. I tried it a couple days ago and I couldn’t even load the MetroFi splash page. And the MSN ad bar was a huge annoyance (after a dozen attempts to even download it).
In the meantime a few of us in the building here decided to split the bill on direct broadband over wireless, so I’m paying $9 to get better service than MetroFi’s $20 Premium service.
I work in an electronics boutique and people more and more come in for whatever antennas and such they need to keep using MetroFi, and I have to tell them that it’s just gone.
It’s disappointing.