I finally got around to patching the orinoco wireless driver on my laptop, so I threw in my spare Orinoco gold and fired up kismet for the drive home. The ~15 mile drive yielded some interesting results:

• Total Networks: 264
• Unique SSID: 156
  • No SSID: 29
  • Netgear: 9
  • Linksys: 36
  • Default: 19
• Total Networks with WEP: 122
• Total Networks without WEP: 142
• % Networks with WEP: 46.2%
• Total Networks Factory Default: 8
• % Networks Factory Default: 3.03%
• Total Clients: 90
• Total Packets: 11975

The only thing that surprised me was the percentage of networks that actually were using WEP. The Aurora/Naperville, IL area is fairly tech-heavy, so the number of networks I found in one trip is to be expected. I’m going to continue this experiment over the next week or so and cover a few different routes to and from work. If I can get my gps working properly, I’ll even be able to capture geographical data to go with it.