En route home from a mongering trip in Jakarta, I got stuck in Taipei for half a day yesterday due to a layover with Eva Air. Since I was tired from three weeks of mongering, and was sad to find a lack of Western food in that airport (except for spaghetti), I was bored to death until I spotted a 110v outlet to recharge my laptop's dead battery. My laptop has wireless, and it looks for hotspots everywhere it is turned on. Well, there are several unsecured wireless networks (no security, no login/password needed) operating in the ticketing level, to the far right of the entry. At least two unsecured networks were open to users and were not government connections. As a tourist, I felt obliged to test them out. Average connect speed was 128kps.

I instantly became less bored, as now I had an afternoon to surf instead of (just) watching the Taiwanese female asses walk by in their cute green Eva skirts. Taiwanese girls seem to have the flat-ass look of Thai girls, with exceptions, but I must say that watching Taiwanese girls strut down the aisles a dozen times each is infinitely more satisfying than seeing the bloated, over-painted, verbose beached whales commom to domestic carriers. But I digress...

After charging and surfing for an hour, I walked around pushing my luggage cart, laptop open and surfing away, to gauge signal strength of the wireless provider (whomever they were). The signal disappeared when I crossed the halfway point of the ticketing section, so I stayed in the section identified earlier, to the far right as you enter the terminal. The signal is weaker but constant upstairs from the ticketing area, in the food court.

After eating, I returned to the ticketing area and found an inactive ticket counter straight across from the terminal entrance and far right. After standing for a long time, I was hoping to find a place to sit down and recharge my battery while I surfed. No outlets with adjacent chairs were found on this level, but I checked out the inactive ticket counter to see if it had an outlet. It did! I checked for a comfy seat behind the counter. Found one! I moved my laptop behind the counter wall for privacy and expected the signal strength to dissipate. It held! Yahoo! I had a nice dark counter all to myself, recharging my battery, surfing at ADSL speed, and watching nice 20-something asses walk by me. OK, I could wait for my connection in peace now.

Security in the airport was unobtrusive but present. No questions were asked, so no information was offered about what I was doing.

You probably picked up the free hotspots EVA has in their lounges. They are upstairs overlooking overlooking the ticketing area. There are a couple of other lounges that may provide the same service too.