Pajama Entrepreneur

If you travel for business and need to go online frequently, there’s nothing better than having Wi-Fi everywhere in a city. A number of cities in the US and abroad (e.g. Taipei) already have citywide Wi-Fi, but in the largest US cities, they are still either in the planning stage or being rolled out. Philadelphia and Portland are deploying citywide Wi-Fi together with their partners, EarthLink and MetroFi, respectively. Both cities will offer free and paid access.

I track all these developments on my other blog, Muniwireless.com. You can even download a list of US cities and counties that have: (a) live networks; or (b) networks being rolled out.

But if you happen to be in a place that does not have ubiquitous Wi-Fi, what do you do? The most obvious is to use your hotel’s Wi-Fi network. Hotel Chatter has posted a list of the best US Wi-Fi hotels for 2007 and a list of the worst (the expensive hotels tend to be in this group). For those who travel outside the US, here’s a list of best/worst international hotels — based on my own experience and on the comments posted on Muniwireless, if the provider of the hotel’s Wi-Fi is Swisscom Eurospot, it’s terrible and expensive. It might have improved from 2 years ago, but I tend to avoid Eurospot.

Of course, nothing beats free Wi-Fi. Free-hotspot.com has a directory of locations that offer free Wi-Fi access in Europe (where prices for Wi-Fi access are outrageous).

Tip: if you are traveling with a companion, you can share a Wi-Fi connection between your laptops. Just turn on your Mac’s network sharing feature. What, you don’t own a Mac? Get one, please.