The St. Louis Bar & Grill chain has expanded a lot over the past few years, and Wireless Toronto has set up free wifi at the ones at Atrium on Bay and at Fairview Mall. This week they opened at 528 Yonge Street (at Breadalbane, one block south of Wellesley), and that location’s now also a Wireless Toronto hotspot. Link: http://www.stlouiswings.com/locations/toronto/central/yonge-street/
Wychwood Open Door is a day-time drop-in centre that has served homeless and socially isolated people in Toronto’s midtown St. Clair West community since 1986. We’re really happy to be working with them to make wifi available in their space, including to two donated desktop computers which are now available for use. More info: http://www.wychwoodopendoor.org/
I’m surprised that there isn’t already an easy-to-use set of technologies in place to address this everyday, obvious, frustrating problem. But it’s very encouraging to see it being taken on:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/open-wireless-movement
Wireless Toronto co-founder Jason Roks is working with Buenos Aires Libre to set up some open-mesh, and picked up some media coverage in Pagina/12.
Nice yoda, Jason.
Our well-organized sibling groups in Quebec are having their annual community wifi summit in Drummondville next weekend. At the same time will be AuthPuppyCamp — the first(?) open meetup to discuss AuthPuppy, the platform which replaces WifiDog. I can’t make it, but I’m sure they’d be happy if someone from Toronto was there. It’ll be in French, unsurprisingly. A little early press coverage:
Gabe will be presenting Wireless Toronto in the pre-unconference part of the Social Tech Un/conference that Free Geek Toronto is organizing this Saturday at OISE: http://stcu.freegeektoronto.org/?page_id=26 There are some great speakers in the morning, and the afternoon unconference should be good too. Come say hi! It’s free to attend; register here: http://stcu.freegeektoronto.org/?page_id=5
We first set up a wirelesstoronto node at The Carrot Common on the Danforth in June 2007, but it spent over a year offline since then. Michael and I got it back up a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been working great…
I had seen the ecstatic proclamation of free wifi at Starbucks in the US a few weeks ago, but missed the announcement that the deal was coming to Canada on July 1st too.
To be clear, “free wifi” of a sort had been available at Starbucks previously: you had to have a Starbucks.com account, and by logging in you could get 2 free hours/day. The new free wifi service is two-click: agree to the terms and click connect. (“Free wifi” versus “free free wifi”? “Free+libre wifi”?)
When you do so, it takes you to what is currently an almost blank version of the Sympatico portal: http://starbucks.sympatico.ca/home
I don’t know what the equivalent page looks like in the US, but I’m guessing that it’s more elaborate:
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Mo’s post to our mailing list:
After spending a lovely afternoon in Dufferin Grove the weekend before last, and seeing the enthusiasm so many people have about the wireless access there, I feel inspired to get together and make something new happen.
i think it might be a good time to get together and start hatching new plans.
Personally, I’d like to explore the idea that if we pick just one of all the great ideas that have been kicking around WT lately, and all get behind making it happen in the next two months, the combined energy and teamwork might help generate enough momentum to roll us into other projects.
So we’re on for Wednesday the 26th.
Let’s meet at the 3 Brewers on Yonge Street, south of Dundas, at 7pm.
Bring ideas!!
Wireless Toronto supplied free wifi in City Hall council chambers last night, for the downtown Better Ballots town hall. It was a great event, and a treat for us to set up a free wifi node in the council chambers — wouldn’t it be great if free wifi was available there all the time?