Wardrivers may have seen Wi-Fi access points Bolsena, Maggiore, Panarea and Stromboli (They are actually in all capitals but I cannot bear to reproduce
shouting.) pop up together on their machines.
The explanation is that they are all in one box on a
Marks and Spencer site. More recently I have seen other Italy-related names replace some of those on the list. When the site offers public Wi-Fi, one of the names will be replaced by the public access.
Previous text from 2014 Jan 02:
I have seen these four in various places, most recently at the Blyth services on the A1 near Doncaster.
The highly recommended
Wi-Fi Analyzer app tells me:
- they are all on the same Wi-Fi channel
- they all have the same signal strength
- they are all from a box made by "Symbol TechnologiesWholly owned Subsidiary of Motorola"
- they have consecutive IP addresses - in this case 00:15:70:7B:28:28 through ... :2B.
From this we can confidently conclude that all four of these access points are located in the same box. Multiple logical access points in one box are not unusual - standard BT wireless routers all offer three different names.
On the basis of the Wikipedia article about Symbol Technologies, I suggest that these access points are in a supermarket or similar and are there to allow hand-held barcode scanners to communicate back to their base. The four different names enable different departments to have independent communication channels.
All four names are geographical features of Italy:
Bolsena and
Maggiore are lakes.
Panarea and
Stromboli are adjacent islands though the latter is better known as a volcano which is effectively the entire island.
(
This page reports seeing "Symbol TechnologiesWholly owned Subsidiary of Motorola" providing WLANFRIENDSHOUSE but when I looked on 2014 Jan 13, I could not see it.)