An article at NowPublic asserts that 24% of Montreal’s wireless networks are unsecured. The study, under the supervision of Champlain College Saint-Lambert professor Marc André Léger, showed that the number was down from the 31% showed in a similar study in May in St. Lambert.

(He’s assuming that there’s no significant difference between wireless networks in St. Lambert and in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where the second study was performed, and considering the demographics of the two areas, particularly in terms of income, that’s a pretty big assumption to make.)

The article also notes that the study appears to make no distinction between unsecured home networks (where someone just bought home a wireless router, left the default settings on and never thought about security) and unencrypted networks that perform security authorization in some other way (Ile sans fil, as well as most commercial networks, allow you to connect freely to the network, but won’t allow you to access anything but their own servers until you login, sign up, purchase service or just click a button below a user agreement).

Without that very important distinction, the survey is kind of meaningless to me.