Wi fi access locations

How to Find Free Wi-Fi Hotspots

Stacy is a professional technology educator with over 25 years’ experience. She has published hundreds of articles, co-authored a book, and has appeared on national and local TV.

Jessica Kormos is a writer and editor with 15 years’ experience writing articles, copy, and UX content for Tecca.com, Rosenfeld Media, and many others.

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What to Know

• Visit retail establishments such as McDonald’s, FedEx, Starbucks, and Barnes and Noble to access free Wi-Fi.
• Call your service provider for a location map of areas that offer free Wi-Fi for customers who are away from home.
• Go to your public library or check out free Wi-Fi websites or apps.

This article includes locations for finding free Wi-Fi hotspots including retailers, websites, apps, service providers, and your neighborhood library.

How to Find Free Wi-Fi Locations

Find free Wi-Fi locations near you with this list of places where you can hop on your phone, tablet, or laptop and get free Wi-Fi. There’s a mixture of free Wi-Fi locations on this list, including restaurants and stores that offer free Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi networks, and free Wi-Fi options through your ISP. These locations are found in most cities. Once you know where to go, you can get free internet any time you want.

Find Free Wi-Fi Locations Through AT&T

Lots of places use AT&T as their internet provider to offer free Wi-Fi. Some of these locations include McDonald’s, Barnes and Noble, FedEx, Starbucks, and numerous hotels.

There isn’t a hotspot map on the AT&T website to help you find free Wi-Fi, but they do suggest using a hotspot locator app like the one mentioned below.

Most of the AT&T free hotspots use the same SSID of attwifi.

Free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s

Over 11,000 McDonald’s locations offer free Wi-Fi through AT&T. You can find these locations through a hotspot locator app. However, if you want free access at McDonald’s only, and don’t need to look elsewhere, you can search for it here, too.

Find a free McDonald’s Wi-Fi location by searching for a restaurant. However, some owner-operators might disable Wi-Fi, in which case you won’t be able to access it.

To use the internet for free at a McDonald’s, connect to the network called Wayport_Access or attwifi_mcd, open a web browser, and then choose the Connect button.

Use a Starbucks for Free Wi-Fi Access

Similar to McDonald’s, Starbucks serves free Wi-Fi through another company, but instead of AT&T, Starbucks uses Google. It works in the U.S. and in Canada. Wi-Fi is free at all company-owned Starbucks locations.

When you give the Starbucks map your current location, it finds all the free Wi-Fi locations near you. You can also filter the results by service, such as for ones that offer mobile payment or 24-hour access.

The wireless network Starbucks uses for free Wi-Fi is called Google Starbucks. Select that network, complete the fields that display on the screen, and then choose Accept & Connect.

Get Free Wi-Fi Anywhere via OpenWiFiSpots

Tens of thousands of places with free Wi-Fi locations have been manually added by the users of OpenWiFiSpots, and there are a few ways to search for these hotspots.

OpenWiFiSpots can be used free through their website. The site finds free nearby Wi-Fi by city and displays it on a map as well as in a list. You can also find a location by type, such as airports, train stations, pharmacies, public parks, and shopping malls.

OpenWiFiSpots finds free Wi-Fi anywhere, including the United States, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, and other countries.

Search for Wi-Fi Near You Using Boingo

Boingo is another search engine where you can find places with Wi-Fi. Its database includes information on over one million hotspots.

Enter a city, address, or postal code to get a map and a list of locations. Once the search results show, you can narrow results by location type, like airports, restaurants, hotels, stores, or cafes.

Your search results can be exported to a PDF file that includes the location name, address, and Wi-Fi SSID for easy offline viewing.

Click any hotspot on the map for the name of its SSID and an option to see directions to that location from any other location.

You can also use Boingo to find Wi-Fi near you and get directions to any of the locations with their iOS app or Android app. It’s also available on Windows and Mac.

Boingo is no longer a free service, but you may qualify for the free service if you use American Express. Contact the AMEX service desk to inquire.

Use Wi-Fi-FreeSpot Directory to Find Free Wi-Fi Anywhere

Free Wi-Fi locations in the United States, Asia, Canada, the Middle East, and other areas can be found through The Wi-Fi-FreeSpot Directory.

You can look for locations by state, country, or region. You can also browse by special location, which supports looking for companies, hotels, airports, RV parks, and vacation rental property that offer free Wi-Fi.

This website isn’t as detailed as some of the others from this list, so check the sources from above first. Instead of showing specific locations and network names, you’re given a website link to the company, park, or hotel, leaving you to contact the business or go to their website for Wi-Fi information.

Free Wi-Fi at Your Local Library

Most libraries have free access to computers, and some also offer free Wi-Fi so you can bring your laptop or smartphone in with you to get free internet.

Public libraries that have free Wi-Fi access include:

It’s best to visit your local library or access their official website for information on whether they offer free Wi-Fi and for details on how to connect to their network. Some networks are open, but others require a password or a library card number.

A program called Library HotSpot is available at the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library. This is a free service they offer to people who don’t have internet access at home. It works by giving out a free wireless modem that they can use for a limited time.

How to Get Free Wi-Fi Access Through Your ISP

Though it’s not strictly a free way to get Wi-Fi, if you’re a paying customer of select internet service providers (ISPs), you might be able to access free Wi-Fi hotspots at hundreds of thousands of locations around the U.S.

This works through Cable WiFi, which is a joint network name created by Cox Communications, Optimum, Spectrum, and XFINITY to bring free Wi-Fi to their subscribers. This means if you get internet at home through Cox, for example, you can benefit from your subscription when you travel.

Visit your provider’s website for location maps and more information on how this works. The free Wi-Fi network you should look for with these providers might be called CableWiFi but could also go by the company name, such as xfinitywifi or CoxWiFi. Log in with the username and password that you use with your ISP.

On the go and looking for Wi-Fi? Here are some free Wi-Fi hotspot locator apps to help you out.

Use a Wi-Fi app to analyze the network you’re on to see other devices that are connected to it or to see how secure the network is.

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How to locate an access point

Usually, locating an access point requires the use of a spectrum analyzer, such as HackRF, or a Wi-Fi analyzer for trying to determine the access point location by proximity according to signal strength.

Along many different Wi-Fi network analysis, we have found that suspicious or unknown network signal transmission sources could come from unusual locations such as a solar Wi-Fi card mounted on a building, a surveillance video camera, a Wi-Fi router at a maintenance room, or an automated robot at a factory. Locating these access points was necessary for evaluating their impact on the surveyed wireless network security and for keeping an AP inventory up-to-date.

Therefore, having an appropriate Wi-Fi tracking and device triangulation tool for access point location is often very useful, and our team has added these capabilities to Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps, our Wi-Fi site survey software.

Locating an Access Point

In order to locate a wifi access point, we have to first create a site survey project on Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps. Once the project has been created, site signal strength measurements must be performed using the three available methods:

• GPS capture: If you have a GPS device, with coverage, simply move through the area to be analyzed with the GPS activated.
• Manual capture over blueprint or satellite map: Select each location where network and signal strength measurements will be performed over a building blueprint or satellite map (Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.).
• Continuous capture: On Continuous mode, you will only have to click on any place in the blueprint or satellite map to start moving through the surveyed area, to then select the final position once you have finished.

After completing this process, which usually takes from 5 to 30 minutes, depending on the dimensions of the area to perform the Wi-Fi coverage or access point triangulation and location analysis, Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps will automatically use several advanced triangulation algorithms to accurately locate all identified access points.

By default, only those access points detected to have a -70dbm or stronger signal are located. You can do this task manually or you can have the software re-calculate an access point location, and the results can be exported to a Word or Google Earth compatible file.

Access point triangulation visualization can also be enhanced by using a Wi-Fi heatmap and its level curves.

If, for any reason, you need to locate a WiFi access point, Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps is the software that you are looking for. Download the fully-functional free 15-day trial version now!

So tell us, what was the strangest place where you have found an access point?

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