I reported a couple of weeks ago that Minneapolis had announced 117 free wi-fi spots in the City as part of their citywide network and an effort to bridge the digital divide. Well, Sheila Regan from the Twin Cities Daily Planet did a little investigative reporting. She went around to a number of the 117 hotspots to see how it was working.

The first lesson was that the free network is USIW Free WiFi *not* the City of Minneapolis Public WiFi. You need to provide a credit card to get into the system and the network is not readily available in all 117 places yet. (Apparently there are homeland security reasons that they require the credit card.)

But once Sheila caught onto the intricacies, it seems as if she enjoyed the free public network. (And since she went through the rough patches, we don’t have to!)