Wireless networks in Whitefish Bay
Coming home from Bucketworks, Nick and I drove around Whitefish Bay last night with KisMAC running on my Powerbook. It was a pretty fast and rough survey, because it would have taken a while to drive up and down every street, so for the most part we did every other block. Therefore, coverage is a bit spotty in places.
My best estimate right now is that there are approximately 2,200 wireless access points in Whitefish Bay. Wikipedia says that there are 5,457 households (according to the 2000 census), which puts wireless penetration at about 40% of all WFB households. That's pretty damn good. If we assume that most households in Whitefish Bay now have broadband (say, 80%), then roughly half of everyone who has an internet connection has wireless. It also means that even if you don't have a wireless network, either of your adjacent neighbours probably do.
However, there are ever-fewer open networks. In their earliest days (circa 1999), most 802.11b networks around were unencrypted. Eight years later, people have wised up:
Around 60% of all the networks are encrypted (45% with WEP and 15% with WPA). Part of this is due to ISPs like Time Warner enabling WEP by default on their packaged 2Wire routers (this accounts for roughly 8% of the wireless networks in WFB). This is probably why Whitefish Bay has a slightly higher percentage of encrypted networks versus the national average, which is just barely over 50% (according to wigle.net's graphs anyhow).
The only thing that outnumbered the '2WIRE###' formatted essid was the eponymous, ubiquitous and infamous 'linksys', which comprised perhaps 12% of the total networks. 90% of the access points with 'linksys' as the essid were unencrypted.
Beyond this came other obviously default names like NETGEAR (about 50), default (about 20), SMC, Apple Network HEXHEX, belkin54g, hpsetup, Proxim, and MSHOME (all about a dozen each). There was even one FON_AP.
Beyond that, most non-default network names were:
People (Steven, JasonAndNatalie, Mitchell's Airport)
Places (Humboldt Dr, NArdmore, Home, officeNet)
Business names (tmobile, Brueggers_Free-WiFi, Applebees)
Uncreative generic names (Network, Wireless, Airport, Wifi).
Attempts at random humour (FUCKYOU, Cromulence, Bobloblawlawblog, SMELLY, keepoutyoujerkoffs, Notre Dame SUCKS, Bugger Off, BUKKAKE, Strategery, Interweb). All of those are real networks, by the way.
Here is the Google Earth KML file with all of the networks plotted, if you're interested.
--Eoban