Paris is abuzz with open Wi-Fi hotspots, but picking out the signals among all that competing noise is no easy matter Free city-wide Wi-Fi coverage in San Francisco won’t go to the vote until November, but Paris is already moving ahead with its free Wi-Fi plans, opening almost 400 hot spots in public places around the city in mid-July, with a second wave planned for September.With Wi-Fi access springing up everywhere, though, the problem is finding it. Chief among the obstacles is that Paris is altogether too wired.Sure, there are a couple of hundred Parisian Foneros and almost 150 cafés offering free Wi-Fi listed at cafes-wifi.com. Jiwire has over 300 free hotspots around Paris in its database, and lots more sites where local Internet service provider Ozone offers outdoor service to its subscribers for free: and the French capital is abuzz with open Wi-Fi hotspots. But there are also tens of thousands of homes with ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connections, most of them using the all-in-one modem-routers with built in wireless access distributed by their ISPs (Internet service providers). Picking out the open hotspot signals among all that competing noise is no easy matter.From our apartment on the East side of Paris, for instance, I can “see” over a dozen Wi-Fi hotspots, most of them carrying the default SSIDs provided by the ISPs. Theoretically, I ought to be able to connect to a Fonero living in the building across the street, but I’ve had no luck so far. And while Ozone wrote to tell me that our building is within its coverage area, I’ve yet to pick up the Ozone signal.There’s also an ad-hoc (computer-to-computer) connection called “orange.” That SSID is also used by one of the mobile phone networks for its Wi-Fi service, but their nearest advertised base station is over 300 meters away, far too distant for me to pick up at home, so I suspect someone is fishing for the passwords of unsuspecting surfers. Out and about, there are other challenges. Wandering the streets with an expensive laptop in one hand while clicking repeatedly on “Refresh network list” with the other as I scan for signals strikes me as a sure way to lose the laptop. What’s needed is some other way of finding these hotspots.One way to highlight their presence, war-chalking ( making chalk-marks on walls and pavements to indicate a nearby Wi-Fi base-station), was a short-lived media sensation that never caught on with the laptop-toting general public.Better, then, to consult the databases of open hotspots published by the different operators on their Web sites. Once you’ve left home or the office, there’s a chicken-and-egg element to this: you need Internet access to check out those online directories, but you need the directories to find the Internet access. If you can solve that puzzle, then a wealth of detail awaits you. Cafes-Wifi.com and Fon use Google Maps to plot hotspot locations, Fon tagging them with their exact street address, while Jiwire uses Microsoft MapPoint. The Paris city authority has chosen to use its own cartographic service, Paris à la Carte.One problem with Paris à la Carte is that, detailed though it is, it only indicates the hotspot locations with an accuracy of 100 meters or so. That’s great if you’re strolling around the park at Champs de Mars looking for the Eiffel Tower (hint: turn to the West: it’s kind of hard to miss), but less helpful if you’re trying to connect to an (invisible) base station with a range of 10 meters or so.In addition to the online maps, the city authority has also placed posters at the entrance to parks with Wi-Fi hotspots, informing visitors of the service. Cryptically, the posters advise that all you have to do is “activate your laptop’s wireless function and agree to the terms and conditions,” but they still don’t say where in the park you can connect. The city has also reinvented war-chalking, sort of: it claims to have tagged park benches within the hotspots’ coverage area with stickers bearing the service’s discreet purple logo.Despite searching high and low in the park at Promenade des Champs Elysées, eyes — and laptop — wide open, I never found the Internet access promised at the entrance. I did, however, see some small red blossoms that might have been scarlet pimpernel … Technology Industry