Free Wi

Glastonbury has a new headliner: 4G. The Rolling Stones, Arctic Monkeys and Mumford and Sons will share the country airwaves with EE’s super-fast Internet connection, pumping out free Wi-Fi from the back of a tractor.

Britain’s first 4G network is providing Wi-Fi to revellers at Glastonbury Festival this weekend, outfitting one of Worthy Farm’s eco-friendly biodiesel-fuelled New Holland tractors into “the world’s slowest, fastest 4G hotspot.”

Standing within 10 metres of the 4G tractor lets you connect to EE’s 4G LTE mobile data network. Because you connect via Wi-Fi, anyone can use it on any smart phone — you don’t have to be on EE and you don’t need an iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S4, or any other 4G phone.

EE is also speeding things up at Tech City, the East London cluster of tech companies and start-ups informally known as Silicon Roundabout. It’s the first area to benefit from EE’s doubling of current 4G speeds, promising maximum speeds of up to 80Mbps, and everyday speeds of roughly 24-30Mbps.

It’s the season for festival gadgetry: we also recently highlighted the Bloom.fm speaker-packing Wellies and Vodafone phone-charging short shorts.

Are you heading for Pilton this weekend? What are your festival essentials? Leave your thoughts in the comments or leave an important part of your brain somewhere, somewhere in a field on Facebook.

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Free Wi

Free Wi-Fi will be beaming through 80 London Underground stations during the Olympics in July and August, at no cost to you or your Oyster card, thanks to Virgin Media.

Olympic tourists will be able to alleviate the boredom of being crammed into a dirty tunnel, waiting up to half an hour for a Tube train at some stations, by surfing the web and playing Draw Something.

A further 40 stations will be Internet-ready by the end of the year, but after the end of the Paralympic Games in early September, you’ll have to be a Virgin Media customer to use the full Internet. Other passengers will be able to access TfL’s live travel information, but nothing else.

A spokesperson for Virgin Media said the free service will launch ahead of the Games’ opening ceremony and last for the duration of both Olympics and Paralympics, but couldn’t give specific dates.

Mayor Boris Johnson, London’s biggest tousle-haired wiff-waff wibbler, boasted: “This is a fabulous new and free resource which will be in place from this summer when London is being showcased on a global stage and playing host to millions.”

“We’re upgrading the Tube to make it fit for the 21st century,” said Gareth Powell, London Underground’s director of strategy and service development. “This latest innovation is great news for Tube customers, who now have access to emails, web and social media underground for the first time.”

Free Wi-Fi has long been an elusive and oft-promised dream for commuters in London and all over the country. The deal announced today was promised in March last year, although no one said anything about it becoming exclusive after the Olympics. In August, the Mayor’s digital chief Kulveer Ranger pledged that free Wi-Fi — again from Virgin — was coming to the capital’s buses, but the scheme seems to be mired in discussion with local councils.

Glasgow’s subway has had free wireless since late 2010, while a plan to provide mobile phone coverage on the capital’s Tube was banjaxed in 2009.

Are you looking forward to free Internets at your Tube station? Will you be avoiding the Underground like the plague for the duration of the Games? Or are you a Virgin customer from elsewhere in the country wondering why your subscription fees are being used for this? Let me know in the comments, or over on our completely free Facebook page.

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Free Wi

Fancy some free Wi-Fi while you’re out and about during the Olympics? Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Exhibition Road are amongst the seven squares and shopping streets to benefit from free O2 Wi-fi during London 2012.

O2 has worked in collaboration with Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to blanket the posh bits of London with free Wi-Fi. You don’t even have to be an O2 customer, for your mobile or for your broadband. The scheme provides free Internet connection for all, at no cost to council, taxpayer or Russian tax exile.

All you have to do is register once and you should automatically connect every time you’re near a hotspot, sparing you from paying for 3G — especially handy if you’ve come from overseas for the Olympic Games and face roaming charges heftier than an Eastern European shot putter.

You’ll see different stuff on the Wi-Fi home page depending on where you are. Exhibition Road, High Street Kensington, Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street, Regent Street, Leicester Square and Piccadilly will be fully Wi-Fi’d up by the end of July.

“With millions of extra people coming to town for the Games, we want to ensure we showcase the capital as the best city in the world to work and visit,” says comedy toff and Mayor of London Boris Johnson. “The addition of free Wifi to some of our most popular landmarks is crucial in helping to maintaining that reputation.” You tell ’em Boris.

You can also connect to free Wi-Fi while you’re down in the tube station at midnight or any other time, with free Wi-Fi provided by Virgin Media at selected London Underground platforms and ticket halls. That’s also free for the duration of the Olympics.

There’s no word on how long the free Wi-Fi will last, but hey, if you’re going to be stuck in West End traffic for two weeks because of the Games, you can at least moan about it on Twitter for free. What do you think of the Olympics? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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Free Wi

Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable are teaming up to allow their subscribers in New York City and the surrounding area to roam onto each other’s Wi-Fi networks.

All three companies currently offer free Wi-Fi service to their cable subscribers in areas surrounding the Big Apple, including parts of Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Starting Thursday anyone who subscribes to broadband from any of these providers will get free Wi-Fi access on the two other cable operators’ Wi-Fi networks.

The blog Broadband Reports notes this is particularly good news for Time Warner Cable customers. Time Warner has relatively few Wi-Fi hot spots, and it is the predominant cable operator in the city. Cablevision is investing about $310 millionto deliver free Wi-Fi to much of its territory including Amtrak and commuter train stations in its region. Additional free cable-sponsored Wi-Fi hot spots can be found in other public places such as parks.

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Free Wi

Travelers flying on Virgin America over the holidays will get free in-flight Wi-Fi thanks to Google, the companies said Monday.

Google and Virgin America are teaming up to offer free Wi-Fi Internet service for all Virgin America passengers traveling between November 10, 2009, and January 15, 2010.

The Gogo Wi-Fi service, which was rolled out to Virgin America’s entire fleet of planes in May, is normally available for $12.95 for flights of over three hours. It’s $9.95 for flights between one and a half hours and three hours. Flights of less than an hour and a half are $5.95. There’s a special deal for people using smartphones and other Wi-Fi enabled handhelds that costs $7.95 for flights over one and a half hours.

Virgin America estimates that between 12 percent and 15 percent of its customers are using the Gogo Wi-Fi service. On some of its cross-country flights, between 20 percent and 25 percent of its passengers are using the service.

“Since the launch of Wi-Fi on all of our planes, we’ve seen an overwhelmingly positive response from travelers,” Porter Gale, vice president of marketing at Virgin America, said in a statement.

Virgin America hopes that offering the Wi-Fi service will help it win more customers. In a recent survey the airline conducted it found that more than half the respondents said that Wi-Fi would influence their choice of airline. Google and Virgin America are calling the free Wi-Fi promotion a gift to their customers. But for Virgin America it is also a way to give customers a taste of the inflight Wi-Fi service, which will hopefully whet their appetite for Internet service on future Virgin America flights.

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