In Portland, in some places of the city, you can get free wi-fi through MetroFi or Personal Telco. MetroFi has a free and paid service, as you can see from the screenshot, when you are on the free one, you get a nice iframe ad and basically every link you click there is a 5 second ad in between that and the next site you hit, kind of sucks and it doesn’t cover well, but in a pinch, I suppose it works. Personal Telco on the other hand is just a group of people that are setting up wi-fi nodes all over, free ones, or mapping out the other ones that are free, pretty cool. Definitely pretty easy to get online. Or I suppose you could be like most people in my apartment building and sit on the back stairs on the first floor to pick up the free wi-fi at Wired on Burnside… until they close at 6:30 PM 🙂
Steve Novoselac's Blog 