Earlier this week we asked you to share your tips, tricks, and techniques for staying connected when you’re away from your home broadband connection. Now we’re back with a roundup of what you said.
Mooching Wi-Fi was an old standby in everyone’s bag of tricks. The more densely populate the area you live in the better the chances you’ll find an open node to connect to. Twalorn weighs in:
On the opposite side of things, Steve-O-Rama shares why he doesn’t mooch free Wi-Fi and uses his smartphone instead:
We’re with you Steve, which is why we configured our laptops to route through our home broadband connection via secure tunnel. Anyone who is interested in encrypting their Wi-Fi hotspot traffic should check out our tutorial here.
I just don’t trust Starbucks, or their customers, to provide me with a secure wireless experience. Am I paranoid? Yes, very. But then again if I’m away from home and need greater bandwidth than my smartphone can provide for Internet access, I ain’t likely using it to check the weather or if the Mudhens won; I’d be doing work or accessing private data.
Smartphones with high speed connections and the ability to tether to other devices factored into most readers away-from-home plans. Blisk was one of the many readers who has found his smartphone does everything he needs it to do:
For those who use their phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot, J. Howe offers a warning:
That was certainly our experience when we first installed Wi-Fi Tether on a rooted Android phone. If you are wirelessly tethering your to your phone make sure the connection is secure!
Other readers went for the full mobile hot spot package, like Jeff:
Finally we have Rein Couperus who has the distinction of being the only reader who used a mobile connection so far reaching he can check his email from the North Pole:
If you’ve never heard of PSKmail, this overview is an interesting look at how people in remote locations (research stations, sail boats, etc.) are able to send and receive email.
It’s not too late to sound off in the comments here or in the original discussion. How do you stay connected away from home?
