Have you ever been in an airport and it had free WiFi, but it was limited by time or by bandwidth? Well, this article might bring good news to you, because it is possible to bypass such limits, often quite easily (such as this particular case.)

I cannot guarantee that this will work for everyone, certainly it won’t work in every single situation. At an airport where I am currently at you can get free WiFi connection, but only for an hour (2x 30 minute sessions). So what do you do when you run out of time and still need some WiFi? Well, if you use Linux, you might try this:

Install macchanger

They probably identify devices by their MAC addresses, so if we’ve reached the limit on our own MAC, we might get some more time if we get another MAC address, right?

So let’s get to it. Open up your terminal and install macchanger:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install macchanger

Once it’s done, we need to turn off our WiFi device and change the MAC address. So turn off WiFi on your laptop and run this command:

ifconfig

This should show you all of the available internet devices. Find yours, it should be something like wlan{number}, mine is wlan0. Run this command:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down

To change our MAC address we need to run this:

sudo macchanger -r DEVICE

Instead of DEVICE you need to type in your device name. Since in my case it is wlan0 I ran this command:

sudo macchanger -r wlan0

What this does is sets your MAC address to a randomly generated one (temporarily.) Then let’s bring up our device with:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

Of course instead of wlan0

you need to type in your device name. Then just turn on your laptop WiFi, clean out your browser cache and any recently stored cookies and you should be all set.

I hope this works for you, because it certainly did work in my case.