A customer of a business providing hotspot service, such as a hotel or café, is generally not considered to be piggybacking, though non-customers or those outside the premises who are simply in reach may be.
Many such locations provide wireless Internet access as a free or paid-for courtesy to their patrons or simply to draw people to the area.
While some may be in reach from their own home or nearby, others may be able to do so from the parking lot of such an establishment,[2] from another business that generally tolerates the user's presence, or from the public domain.
Since unsecured wireless signals can be found readily in most urban areas, laptop owners may find free or open connections almost anywhere.
Yet other piggybackers are regular subscribers to their own service, but are away from home when they wish to gain Internet access and do not have their own connection available at all or at an agreeable cost.
They may desire to share their Internet access with their neighbours or the general public or may be intimidated by the knowledge and effort required to secure their network while making it available to their own devices.
Many support the practice by stating that it is harmless and benefits the piggybacker at no expense to others, but others criticize it with terms like "leeching," "mooching," or "freeloading."
While persons engaging in piggybacking are generally honest citizens, a smaller number are breaking the law in that manner and so avoid identification by investigators.
Some commentators argue that those who set up access points without enabling security measures are offering their connection to the community.
"[5] Similarly, Randy Cohen, the author of The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine and National Public Radio, says that one should attempt to contact the owner of a regularly used network and offer to contribute to the cost.
[6][7] The policy analyst Timothy B. Lee (not to be confused with Tim Berners-Lee[8]) writes in the International Herald Tribune that the ubiquity of open wireless points is something to celebrate.
[9] Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick responded to an article in Time Magazine to express his disagreement with why a man was arrested for piggybacking a cafe's wireless medium.
The writer himself is not sure what that title really means or how it applies to contemporary society since the code was established regarding computers and their networks during the Cold War era.
In the technical legality of the matter, Masnick believes the code was not broken because the access point owner did not secure the device specifically for authorized users.
Lev Grossman, with Time Magazine, is on the side of most specialist and consumers, who believe the fault, if there is any, is mostly that of the network's host or owner.
An analogy commonly used in this arena of debate equates wireless signal piggybacking with entering a house with an open door.
An access point is an active device that initiates the announcement of its services and, if setup securely allows or denies authorization by its visitors.
Equally, wireless access point owners should be aware that security risks exist when they leave their network unprotected.
An operator merely concerned with the possibility of ignorant strangers leeching Internet access may be less willing to pay a high cost in money and convenience than one who is protecting valuable secrets from experienced and studious thieves.
Also known as tethering, one can interface to their phone either wirelessly using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or wired via cable allowing access to the Internet anywhere there is a cell network signal.
On September 20, 2005, Google WiFi was announced as a municipal wireless mesh network in Mountain View, California.
On November 27, 2012, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a coalition of nine other groups launched OpenWireless.org, an Internet activism project which seeks to increase Internet access by encouraging individuals and organisations to configure their wireless routers to offer a separate public wireless guest network or to open their network completely.