ENABLEnet

Free wifi at the WA State Library

I wrote a ver­sion of this post for the State Lib­rary blog, but I thought I should also post it here to reach the widest audience.

ENABLE­net is in the­ory still in trial mode and has not been pub­licly launched, but has been run­ning quietly for the past two months. Being open to dis­cov­ery and word of mouth has res­ul­ted in over 150 ses­sions a day in the past few weeks. As many people use the wifi on Fri­days, week­ends and pub­lic hol­i­days when the lib­rary is open for fewer hours as they do dur­ing the week.

There is an inter­est­ing mix of devices con­nect­ing, the great major­ity are laptops. How­ever, over 10% are a col­lec­tion of ultra port­able PCs, PDAs, phones (includ­ing a large num­ber of iphones), iPod touches and PSPs (Play­Sta­tion Portable).

The biggest sur­prise from the stat­ist­ics is the lan­guage of the devices con­nect­ing, a third are Eng­lish, another third Chinese, 17% Korean, 8% French, 2.5% Ger­man, 2.5% Japan­ese and the remain­ing 2% other European lan­guages. This is due to the large num­ber of inter­na­tional stu­dents who use the lib­rary to study and that the lib­rary is close to a num­ber of back­packer hos­tels. One of our reg­u­lar users can con­nect from her hostel room.

The tech­no­logy used to provide the ser­vice is the same as Met­roMesh and Resources­Net, with three access points, one on the Art Gal­lery roof and two on the State Lib­rary roof, provid­ing cov­er­age to pub­lic areas of the State Lib­rary, most of the open area of the Cul­tral Centre and even some of James Street. Speed is lim­ited to 128k, which is find for most tasks except down­load­ing large files.

To con­nect it is a simple case of start­ing your wifi, find­ing the SSID of ENABLE­net, con­nect­ing to it and open­ing a browser and going to any page on the inter­net. You will be redir­ec­ted to the ENABLE­net home page, where you have to agree to the terms and con­di­tions, you will then be logged in and dir­ec­ted to another page. From there you can nav­ig­ate away to another web site or use any other inter­net tools.

There have been a few issues, a couple of times there has been power issues which have caused prob­lems with the uplink, which means while the ENABLE­net appears to be work­ing, it does not con­nect you to the net­work (it does not give out an IP address). Unfor­tu­nately because of the inter­mit­tent nature of the fault and the loc­a­tion of the devices (on the roof, 5 stor­ies up), this prob­lem may rear it’s ugly head again.

If you are unfor­tu­nate to be using Vista, on occa­sions it appears to only con­nect to ENABLE­net but not the inter­net and any attempt to open a web page quickly returns an unable to con­nect error. The solu­tion appears to be to type the URL http://slwa.wa.gov.au/wifi/start.html into the browser. The start page will open and once you accept the terms and con­di­tions, you will be logged in. and be able to access the inter­net even though Vista say you can not.

Some­times, you will be logged in but you end on Met­roMesh land­ing page or a inn.roamad.com page say­ing you have suc­cess­fully logged in. This appears to be a ran­dom prob­lem, but do not worry you have been con­nec­ted to ENABLE­net and can browse away.

There is a prob­lem with the login in pro­cess when using a Win­dows Mobile device and Inter­net Explorer, which pre­vents the device from log­ging in cor­rectly and access­ing the ser­vice. This is an issue with Inter­net Explorer as Opera Mobile on Win­dows Mobile does con­nect, and is being addressed. Opera Mini and sim­ilar mobile browsers which require a con­nec­tion to a proxy, do not work.

Do not expect tech­nical sup­port from lib­rary staff, sur­pris­ingly most are lib­rar­i­ans not net­work experts. While they can provide some con­fig­ur­a­tion set­tings for most com­mon OSes, they will not make changes to your laptop. And after see­ing some of the setups of some laptops, I do not blame them.

So if hap­pen to visit the State Lib­rary, the Cul­tral Centre or nearby and con­nect either suc­cess­fully or unsuc­cess­fully please let me know of your experiences.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.