Accessing wifi in Paris

[parisdroid]

Hi, I'm a Verizon Droid user and have just come to Paris. I have easily connected to wifi in my apartment using my own wifi. But I cannot connect to various free wifi hotspots, which are located all over the city. When I try to connect, I am able to actually make the connection (that is, my wifi settings tell me I'm connected), but my browser does not fully load; it just stalls while trying to load. I've tried this with several different wifi accounts, and the result is the same. I've not used wifi in the US, so I can't compare my problems here with what happened before. [For users familiar with Free.fr, I am trying to use Freewifi, which should be available throughout the city.] Any suggestions?

 

[greyghost04]

I never found anything free for Americans in Paris or Europe. Are you sure you are not missing a registration step?

 

[parisdroid]

I never found anything free for Americans in Paris or Europe. Are you sure you are not missing a registration step?

You must not have been in Paris recently. Almost all the parks have free wifi (provided by the city of Paris), and almost the entire 3rd arrondissement has free wifi as well. I am able to access these easily with my laptop.

Plus, and this is what I'm most interested in, the ISP Free has figured out a way to create a "community" among their private account holders that sets up a "public" access to any account holder. All you need is to get a password through your own account, and this is supposed to get you access to any freewifi signal in France. I have that password, and I have seen that I have signals from freewifi, but when I enter the password, I get "connected" but can't get to the internet.

 

[greyghost04]

Nice. You are right.