A Grand Tour of the Weirdest Wi-Fi

Jumping off a bus in the middle of the night, I walk down the side of a Vietnamese highway with my friend, Pascal. It’s extremely dark and full of crickets outside — beside the occasional blare of another bus whizzing past. The blinking blue dot on my iPhone (with data-roaming magically switched off) shows we’ve overshot Dong Hoi, and now must backtrack a few miles by foot. “It’s chill,” I say, “as soon as we start to see houses, we’ll pick up some unprotected Wi-Fi — then we can Google a hotel, call them with Skype, warn them we’re coming, and call a cab.”

While this story shouldn’t dazzle any Dong Hoi locals, the concept is still pretty out there for a pair of westerners, who are much accustomed to the inaccessible nature of other people’s internet. The mapping of obscure Wi-Fi hotspots (see this "Virgin Mobile Live entry) is limited on the web, especially when you don’t have wi-fi access, so allow, please, a chronicling of some out-there internets, some of the weirdest places to cop a little broadband.

“With wireless access available at some parks in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, visitors can enjoy the web in the wild,” explained Lily Boisson of the CBC. This is awesome. I’m always checking for regular cell-range while I’m out on a trail, or hiking up a mountain. And I’m sure I’m not alone. People become cellular cartographers in these situations, surveying the wilderness for places where we can finally do something like this:

My 3rd summit of Mt. Dana. Mono Lake in background. 13,057 ft. twitter.com/danstuckey/sta…

— Daniel Stuckey (@danstuckey) August 12, 2012

Continuing up to higher elevations, Wi-Fi has its place on the frontiers and fringes of this world. I don’t think it threatens to civilize the wilderness in the eminent way that cement and housing do, but I do think it puts groups of climbers and soloists into communicable range with anyone (not just walkie-talkies) after stepping outside of earshot.

If you didn’t hear before, one of the bigger buzzwords at SXSW — besides Kreayshawn, Grimes and A$ap Rocky — was Homeless Hotspots. The music festival also included other fun like Catch a Chevy (where hot girls drive you around Austin as free taxis) and Boxed Water.

This shit is hilarious. In the hills of Hoyshaya, Israel, at a biblical reenactment park, folks learn what it’s like to have lived 3,000 years ago. But, not without having some porn to look at while they oblige their parent’s wishes. Parents who are probably just doing cocaine and watching porn back at a Nazareth b’n’b.

It’s about time a subterranean networking showed up in the Big Apple. What makes this odd? Some people thought it would never happen. I can’t help but think of a ton of other places I’ve seen it: On the underground in Milan, on the underground in Hong Kong. Cell coverage on San Francisco BART dates back a decade, and Chicago’s CTA has had it for six years.

You’d think Virgin would’ve used a list of totally obscure places to boast the Wi-Fi available on their sister companies spacecraft. But then again, such marketing strategies might conflict with a commercial space venture geared toward relevance and affordability. Of course there is going to be Wi-Fi up there!