7 Comments

Boingo Offers Free Wi-Fi to iPhone Owners: Here is How EVERYONE Can Get It Free

August 2, 2007 by in Apple,Cool with 7 Comments

Boingo announced that it will provide free Wi-Fi access to iPhone owners through 13 North American airports (Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport, Midway International Airport, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Will Rogers World Airport, O’Hare International Airport, Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, and Toronto Pearson International Airpor) during the month of August. To take advantage of the free service, iPhone users just have to latch onto the “concourse” SSID with an an iPhone.

But it’s not fair that it is limited to just iPhone users. Here is how you can change your browsers User Agent, on your laptop to enjoy free wireless access as well.

First you have to trick the website that you are visiting that you are actually an iPhone. To do that you need to modify your browsers ‘User Agent.’ If you use FireFox download User Agent Switcher (UAS) to start the process.

Then you need to alter the UAS settings (Tools – User Agent Switcher – Options – Options – User Agents – Add) to the following:

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Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

(Make sure all of that is on one line)

Simple as that! Now you should be able to access free WiFi internet.

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  • David Bendit

    If you don’t want to install the extension, and don’t mind the repercussions of identifying as the wrong browser (read: some stuff not working/looking right), you can go to about:config and add/change the key general.useragent.override with that same user agent string from above. Then all websites will think that you’re using an iPhone. To change it back to the default, just delete the key.

  • chad

    awesomeness…. now if I just used any of those airports :D

    why’d they have to skip Atlanta, Dallas, and SFO?!?!?!

    I wish every airport would just be like Fort Lauderdale and give free WiFi to everyone.

  • sheel

    totally agree that airports should all have free WIFI… like Pittsburgh

  • Aron

    I am in chicago right now on my macbook. Thank you.

  • Anya

    maybe it’s even better marketing than it first seems :)

    1) release iPhone;
    2) get Boingo to offer free wifi to “iPhones,” knowing that large numbers of non-iPhone users will change their user-agent strings and forget (or not care) about changing them back;
    3) many more “iPhones” reported to be on the web;
    4) more designers making sure their pages work & look great on iPhones;
    5) more people thinking & telling their friends, “Wow the iPhone makes websites look great”;
    6) PROFIT!!!

  • Lorne

    Working great here from Newark International.

    Thanks!

  • http://none Flipz

    Works for BWI, My southwest flight is delayed 2 1/2 hours :(, but this is going to come in very handy.

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