Perhaps someone here can advise us?

We just got a new laptop (first actually) from Dell. And it has the wireless
card. Our neighborhood was supposed to have a free wireless feature this fall,
to replace the free dialup we used to have thru our library (using tax dollars).

When we booted up, our card detected one open unsecure location and one
secure one. The unsecure one is 10MB and that is not the speed the free one
is supposed to be. So I guess we hooked into someone else. My son says
100ft radius, but we don't have that (the house next door is empty). We may
be hitting a business across the stream downtown? The free service--I checked it out, and they plan on early winter 2006.. soon. Some hassel about fights over telephone poles etc.. blah blah.. It was supposed to be here now)

I am checking out Wireless security sites , still a newbie at this, but they say
basically that anyone can enter your harddrive etc if you use this technology.
Would a Zone Alarm firewall be enough? Do I need some encryption software?
What are they called? Etc? I will not let my hubby do any banking on that
unit..until we figure it out. These "free" hot spots.. are they all problematic, like the one we would like to use on vacation next summer? I am paranoid about this. We are getting a router to use with the DSL we just signed up for from AT & T... but we have the slowest (cheapest) version, which is not really super fast, but better than dial-up Earthlink. We don't download stuff like music/videos..and are not gamers, etc.

So any advice would be greatly appreciated...before we get into some snafu!