MagnoliaWave

The City of Southaven has been developing a metropolitan wireless Internet Service Provider. The first areas were serviced by some kind of microwave service (more later). You had to be near one of the city's water towers. Then you had to have a special antenna and modem. A friend of ours had it and its bandwidth was around 512 Kbps. Pretty pitiful.

As I rode through my neighborhood recently, I saw this on a street light pole.

When I got home, I grabbed my laptop and went looking for new wireless networks. Nothing there.

Then last night, I tried again and there it was:

So you know what I did. Yep, connected to it. Don't worry. That laptop is running a firewall.

But I immediately got this:

I guessed that they were intercepting http and forcing some kind of logon so I went to my browser and got this:

It looks like they're using "NetNearU."

The homepage for MagnoliaWave says their price is $30/month and run at 1 Mbps. They also have daily access at $6.95 per day. They referred to their roaming partners so I hoped they had partnered with AT&T but no luck.

From the logos on the homepage it seems like the earlier solution was WaveRider from Vecima.