Free Wifi in Newark Airport
I get a lot of traffic to this page each day, so now that you’re here, why not take a look around at all the other stuff i keep here? Maybe you’ll find something interesting. Be my guest, please 
Update: Unfortunately, it seems the fine folks at Newark have fixed this little glitch. It was nice while it lasted!
This will show you how to get free wifi from the Boingo hotspots in Newark airport. It’ll probably also work on other Boingo hotspots, but I haven’t tried it yet. If it works, please post a comment, would be nice to know. Now, read on and I’ll tell you how to do this in-between all my ramblings.
So, I’m sitting here in Newark Liberty International Airport (what a long name), and having a few hours to waste before my flight, I figured i’d try to find some open wireless networks, and have a little surfin’ fun. Unfortunately, as I expected, no networks accidentally left open was to be found, so another route had to be taken. I need my internet fix. So here’s how it works:
Boingo is kind enough to offer free wifi in all of Newark airport, with a little tricking that is. Trying their network from my iPhone, I noticed i had the option to get 15-minutes of free internet time, if I watched a 15-second ad, that is. Nice deal! Worked painlessly and let me browse the interwebs from my iPhone, but when I pulled out my laptop to write some email, I found that the offer wasn’t available when using a laptop. Doh!
So, what to do? All it requires is a little URL trickery. When you first connect to the Boingo network and open a browser, you will be presented with a Boingo “buy-some-access-time-now-you-rich-person-in-need-of-internet-access-for-the-outrageous-price-of-24.99-dollars” kind of page. We won’t do that. Please notice the unholy URL in your address bar. It’ll be something like:
https://www.boingo.aero/(S(j0vp4xi5o1h6fre12cg5hx55))/Home.aspx
Beautiful. To get your nice and free access, just change the “Home.aspx” part of the url to “FreeOfferAdMobile.aspx”, so the URL will look something like this:
https://www.boingo.aero/(S(j0vp4xi5o1h6fre12cg5hx55))/FreeOfferAdMobile.aspx
Hit enter, wait for the little “connecting” bar to finish, and of you go! Enjoy your free wireless internet access!
10 comments so far
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Thanks for the tip for free Newark wireless access!
I’m connected using this tip right now – thank you!
Just used it this morning. Great tip!
thanks for the tip, it also works at bush intercontinental =)
Just used it. Works wonderfully. I didn’t see the ad though – it just logged me in
You rock.
ps. there’s a limited number of free trials. This is checked by the mac address of your wireless card. So, under linux, just use ‘macchanger’ (is in the ubuntu repos and the gentoo portage tree, dunno about the other distros):
# ifconfig wlan0 down
# macchanger -a wlan0
# ifconfig wlan0 up
Under windows, you can probably find a mac spoofer somewhere or other
Thanks for the positive feedback everyone, and thanks for the tip Oliver! This can also be achieved under OS X using ifconfig:
sudo ifconfig en1 down
sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:00:00:00:00:00
sudo ifconfig en1 up
Where 00:00:00:00:00:00 is a new mac address you just cook up yourself.
Thanks for this, much better to pass the time with and it does seem to work everywhere. I’ll be going international as well so will have to try it overseas as well. For Windows users I would recommend MacMakeUp for the mac changing, its fairly easy and takes almost no time to do.
thanks again
It appears this no longer works, or at least I wasn’t able to get it to work at Newark yesterday. Bummer!
Ian
http://www.mackieimages.com
Not working on March 9 2009.