So as some of you may recall, every time I have to go to take care of my rentals, I stay at my folks' farm, on the "in the boonies" side of town where there has been no broadband available other than $80/ mo satellite (not worth 4-5 days per month of use) and I've been stuck at around 14.4k modem speeds.
I was configuring a Verizon broadband card for a work laptop this weekend, and for the heck of it, took it to the farm just to try out. Yippee!! They have EV-DO there now! So I'm getting myself a card and getting one of these slick Linksys broadband card routers for their house, which lets you plug the card into the router and share the connection via wireless or wired DHCP. I just found out about them when trying to come up with a workable networking solution for one of our research vessels at work -- these are WAY slick! No more cussing while surfing APS and waiting for some of your damn oversized embedded images taking two hours to load!
So the WTF question is when I had the laptop at the farm, the regular wireless card was picking up unsecured "free wireless" at their house (the kind you often see at airports that usually leads me to believe someone is hoping you'll logon so they can get into your computer). The laptop I was using was a travel laptop with no critical info on it, so for kicks I let it try and logon. It worked and I was getting working Internet. The signal was weak, but stable for the few minutes I remained connected.
The closest neighbors are 1/4 mile away and I know they don't have wireless. The next closest are about 1/2 mile away and it expands from there. So does anyone have an idea where this signal might be coming from? I can't believe it would be worth a crook's time to hang out in a sparsely populated area waiting for someone to try and logon to a free wireless service that they are transmitting.
