Having an international data plan can be extremely useful if you travel abroad often, but not everyone can afford one. T-Mobile indeed offers an unlimited-data-internationally plan (albeit it’s slow), but it costs about $60/month. So what about the rest of us? One could try and rely on free wifi hotspots around the globe if they wished, but my preference while on the move is to be able to find it much more reliably than that!
That’s where several applications for your phone and computer come in. Meet Instabridge and Wifi Free, two apps created to solve this problem. They work by storing user-submitted SSID’s for networks and their passwords in a database and making them accessible to you. You can browse these wifi connections via a map, and sort them by those closest to you. The database for both applications is already pretty sizable, especially in larger cities like Amsterdam and Seoul, but some may wish to make it even bigger; that’s where you can come in! If you want to help bolster the database, you can only add the SSID and its password to the database if you are currently connected to it, which keeps the database free of fake passwords. The establishments offering the wifi are supposed to not mind you having it for them to be added, but how much that is enforced is dubious. Still, if you don’t mind connecting to places who normally would let you if you were a customer of theirs, these apps (and those related to them) are for you.
There is a catch for most of the free ones, however.