Tuesday, May 29, 2007

War Driving - Free Wireless for a Lazy Man

What does a lazy man do when his home Telstra phoneline has a fault and gets disconnected? Well because ADSL2+ and ADSL are run over local phone line pairs - it means the faulty landline caused no internet.

In Australia there is one physical phone network, provided by majority government owned Telstra, or Telecom as it used to be called.

This beast of a telco doesn't give a rats bottom about service or support and obviously they can charge a stack because they have no competition. Luckily the government has allowed other parties to put their own DSLAMS in the exchanges here - otherwise we would die from Telstra overload.

Anywayz, I picked up my IBM Thinkpad, and my USB Belkin wireless dongle - and began walking around the local area to pickup wireless networks. I live in the outer suburbs of Sydney (Macarthur / Campbelltown Area) and was unsure how many wireless networks I would detect. I was surprised to detect something like 10 networks in my small street alone. Of these networks I had 1 that was unprotected, very interesting.

I went back and got into my Mitsubishi Starwagon Van, drove some more - and found quite a few networks, 2 more unlocked as well. I stopped the van, got into the back seats and logged on to one of the wireless networks. I got connected at 24mbs and got super smooth and fast internet for a good 2 hours until my battery ran out. I was amazed, and will soon be doing some more wardriving and bringing along a friend of mine who recently bought a Nokia N95 from Allphones. This baby will allow us to get even more mobile and really pin point the best spots for the wireless networks.

Lazy people stay tuned, I will look to post more info on my war driving and wireless network investigations very soon. Software reviews and tools will be included.

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