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« April 2004 | Main | June 2004 »
Auckland City and ISP sponsor free Wi-Fi for June in central business district: Reach Wireless, which uses RoamAD’s Wi-Fi mesh technology, has launched its central business district (CBD) service in New Zealand’s Auckland City. The CBD and Reach are sponsoring free Wi-Fi with a downtown purchase through the month of June as a promotion.
RoamAD’s VP of business development Martin Levy said that service speeds range from 500 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps throughout the three-kilometer-square covered area. Pavements have been marked with a “Wi-Fi Zone” tag, and people in orange suits and hard hats—for visibility, Levy said—are handing out information packets during June (see inset photo).
Regular service costs are NZ$8.50 (US$5.27) for an hour, NZ$16.95 (US$10.50) for a day, NZ$49.95 ($30.97) for monthly users that the press release describes as “light” (600 megabytes of transfer), and NZ$74.95 ($46.47) for “uncapped reasonable use service”: 10 gigabytes per month after which your service speed may be capped at 256 Kbps.
Posted by Glennf at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Almost superb AP story on the lack of simple setup in Wi-Fi home gateways: The reporter neatly details the difficulties in all of the current Wi-Fi gateways in turning security on, especially in gateways and adapters designed by different companies.
The only point the writer misses is that WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), which is required in all new Wi-Fi equipment, allows the entry of a simple passphrase instead of a long sequence of hexadecimal numbers.
But there’s so much pre-WPA equipment out there that hexadecimal WEP keys are still the rule of the day—most adapters (but not all wireless gateways) can be patched to handle WPA, but a user who can’t figure out hex keys won’t be able to figure out where to find obscure firmware upgrades.
Windows XP requires patches and a rollup to support WPA, while Apple users must installed Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) for WPA support. As WPA support permeates the home market through updates and upgrades to hardware, and as new equipment fills homes, you might see security improve through less obscurity.
Posted by Glennf at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Newsweek covers all forms of wireless networking and cellular telecom across several stories this week: The package of articles opens with Steven Levy musing about why people find wireless technology so compelling. You can distill his interesting and accurate overview of the field into this sentence: The ease of distribution becomes a force in itself, pushing networks to handle more bandwidth.
It’s a restating of Metcalfe’s Law, in part: The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it. Therefore, every computer added to the network both uses it as a resource while adding resources in a spiral of increasing value and choice.
Wireless networks require substantial innovation and expense in developing the basic technology, but then each additional node has substantially less cost associated than with increasing a wireline network, whether in an office or across a city. Wireless reduces the friction in accelerating the density of network, and that rollercoaster ride into exponential power is where speed freaks get their high.
A bar at the right top of the article links to the several other pieces in the package, but I’ll point out two notable pieces: The Wireless World offers a city-by-city rundown of some of the more interesting uses of wireless data, including entire towns blanketed with Wi-Fi and Austin, Texas’s intense density of free hotspots. The other article to note is A Few Who Got Us Here, which puts NYCwireless co-founder Anthony Townsend in the first position alongside the founder of BlackBerry’s maker Research in Motion, and a VP at Samsung.
Posted by Glennf at 8:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Avaya, Motorola, and Proxim combine on a handset that talks Wi-Fi in an enterprise and cell elsewhere—but only the 802.11a flavor of Wi-Fi: Requiring the use of 802.11a is an interesting choice, because it avoids many of the interference, latency, and dropped packet issues present in using an overtaxed, QoS-free 802.11b/g network. With 802.11a, you could conceivably devote several in-building channels to voice or have a sufficient density and overlap of coverage that you wouldn’t suffer from bandwidth lacks.
One analyst quoted in the story suggests that enterprises will eventually all use 802.11a, but I’d like to see some evidence of that. A number of vendors sell a/g equipment for the enterprise, and I’ve seen no information on an upswing in dual-radio adoption.
A more compelling option for 802.11a is via products that have multiple radios or multiple channels in a single box, such as products powered by Engim’s chipset. In that model, because each access point could have several hundred Mbps of actual throughput through bonded or standalone channels, it would be worth deploying the denser installation required by 802.11a. 802.11b and g have substantial limits on total system speed because of their staggered and overlapping channels.
Posted by Glennf at 1:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nobody likes to make enemies, but I have to be honest about the dollar-to-content value of this book: Let me be clear from the outset. I don’t know any of the authors of this book, except by reputation, and have nothing but the highest regard for their technical knowledge and their achievements. The folks who wrote WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend are experts about most of what they write about, and offer great technical insights and tips throughout.
That said, I can’t recommend this book primarily because the best advice is already available on the Web for free in much the same form; chunks of the most practical early part of the book are repetitive to cover different operating systems or scenarios with the same approach; the middle part of the book comprises a 60-page-long set of anecdotes with long code extracts; and the last part of the book features security advice that’s somewhat strange focusing on commercial software and hardware that’s obscure and hard to use and mostly out of keeping with the kind of audience that could possibly be interested in this title.
A factor that led to book bloat (520 pages, no CD-ROM, $49.99) is the lengthy reproduction of code, sometimes double spaced that a reader must be expected to input rather than download or copy and paste from a Web page. Further, many of the programs seem too idiosyncratic to be of general utility, arguing against their inclusion in the printed book even if other programs were printed in full.
For fairness’s sake, after reading this book a few weeks ago, I sent the publisher’s publicist contact my remarks and a list of errors found in the book. I was promised some follow up and didn’t get it, so the statute of limitations of waiting for a response to specifics has ended. I should also make it clear that I have co-written a book on wireless networking which has practically no overlap with this book.
In general, the book is best at collecting and providing documentation on the trickiest aspects of scanning for, recording, and defending against wardriving and Wi-Fi network cracking. Some of the areas on defense are the strongest in the book, although other areas seem highly misguided.
From the first page of the book to the end of Chapter 7, page 243, it’s at its strongest. It’s a cogent, how-to guide to installing and using stumbling and detection software. While much of this could be found online, it’s the best use of screen captures, code excerpts, configuration details, and tips. If the book had ended on page 243 and cost, say, $30, I’d be giving it an entirely positive review.
My only real problem with that first chunk is on pages 5 and 6, where warchalking is treated contemptuously for no good reason I can determine. The sidebar makes it sound like warchalking was a media invention instead of a set of simple graphics invented by Matt Jones. (For some odd reason, there’s a sub-class of writers who are Jones deniers or ignorers—a major newsmagazine refused my request to correct a statement in a Wi-Fi article that read “nobody knows who invented warchalking,” for instance.) There’s also a specious survey of 48 people who have never seen a warchalking mark in the wild, “proving” that warchalking doesn’t exist.
But contradictorily, warchalking is then used throughout the rest of the book. It’s used to identify software, meeting points, the WorldWide Wardrive—and that doesn’t include the companies like Jiwire or hotspots community and commercial that have adopted the )( symbol. I can’t quite figure out the rant’s purpose or intent. It doesn’t matter if warchalking marks have appeared spontaneously on pavement; it does matter that a recognizable graphic element has entered the group consciousness, which the book proves it has.
The book abruptly shifts into anecdote in Chapter 8 starting on page 245 and continuing through many DefCons and WorldWide Wardrives and fully reproduced scripts to page 313. I’m sure to offend the author of that section, but dropping the scripts and condensing the long stories of interest primarily to the participants—do we really care about the parking lot at the hotel?—would have provided better advice for creating wardrives and contests. A few pages of anecdote, downloadable code, and a tightly written set of guidelines and principles would have been much more useful.
Chapter 9 effectively covers a range of methods to compromise encryption or networks, and offers good advice about it. But the remainder of the book is spotty. It has quite basic chunks on using WEP and WPA which seem out of place—more manual-like than book-like. And the authors spend quite a while covering one free (from Reefedge, but at no charge) and three commercial methods (Linksys, Microsoft, and Funk) of securing access, some of which are quite extraordinary, such as using a Linksys VPN router to configure an end-to-end tunnel to secure traffic. I’ve tried using that Linksys VPN to do that, and even with the number of pages devoted to it in this book, it’s not for the faint of heart.
The coverage of using EAP-TLS over 802.1X as a reasonable method baffles me. It requires a public key infrastructure, and has several alternatives, including PEAP and EAP-TTLS, that avoid the PKI issue entirely. PEAP can be implemented for free, as well, instead of using a commercial server.
Oddly, too, there’s no reference to FreeRADIUS which has Wi-Fi authentication components, or the discontinued but still robust FreeS/WAN network encryption management system—which seem like no-brainers to include or at least mention.
I haven’t even mentioned that the choice of spelling wardriving as WarDriving throughout the book is slightly distracting.
Other errors point to a potentially long genesis of the book, which may explain why it feels outdate in parts but completely timely in others. On page 372, the WRT54G configuration is shown using firmware that’s a year old, which is very strange given that that was a pre-certification 802.11g release, and didn’t include WPA, either. The book covers NetStumbler’s 0.4.0 release, which postdated release of the book.
I wanted to like or even love this book, but only parts of it are compelling. At fifty bucks, I’d rather buy a Wi-Fi card and spent my time researching configuration online.
Posted by Glennf at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Your editor has been trying to sort these story out for a couple of days: T-Mobile’s hotzone powered by Comcast broadband: The problem with a story like this is that it’s been given enormous play because it’s a major city and a large area. But it’s planned to be a paid location after the first six months, and it’s not particularly interesting as a “partnership,” because Comcast’s role is mostly marketing. Sure, they’re bringing in bandwidth, but any Internet provider would do. Likewise, T-Mobile has no other outdoor hotzones that I’m aware of, and it’s unclear what the point is of this one: a trial balloon?
The press release and coverage cites the fact that Comcast customers have access to T-Mobile’s hotspot service. Sure, and so do I: the rate, as far as I can tell, is the same. Again, marketing. I thought about not covering this at all, but it’s worth explicating the event.
Meanwhile, in cities around the country, hotzones like NewburyOpen.net in Boston and Battery Park in Manhattan are sprouting that are commercially supported free locations designed to be free indefinitely and focusing on areas with high appropriate traffic.
Posted by Glennf at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, expands a one-year trial of free Wi-Fi in its downtown: I first heard about this on the radio program I was interviewed on yesterday on New Hampshire Public Radio (show archived at this page). The first year had 600 unique users connect to a free hotspot in the Market Square area. They’re extending that and hoping for twice the users using donated services and hardware. The cost must be quite minimal. Now 600 people (not 600 sessions) only translates into an extra few people a day, on average, but Portsmouth is using whatever tools they have to increase traffic to the community. The fellow interviewed alongside me on the radio said that their big time is cyclical, every four years, when the primaries roll through the state, and that reporters were filing over the free Wi-Fi this last winter.
Posted by Glennf at 12:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chaska, Minnesota’s city government will offer Wi-Fi citywide for broadband connectivity: Using Tropos gear, the city will charge $16 per month for access to the network, which will also be used for public safety. The town has 18,000 residents, and they expect 2,000 people to sign up for service. The offering will inclue about 200 Tropos access points over a 12 to 13 square mile area.
Posted by Glennf at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It’s not a truck stop, it’s a travel center, and its 150-plus locations will be wireless by July: Travel Centers combine truck stop features with RV and auto drivers needs, and they’ll add Wi-Fi to the mix—it’s a must have for any place in its category now. The 40 company-owned stores are already unwired; the franchisees will be ready to go by July 3. Service will cost $1.49 for an hour, $4.49 for 24 hours starting at the time of purchase, $22.49 for two months, and $169.99 per year. These longer plans are designed truckers to ensure brand loyalty. Diesel-fuel buyers can cash in RoadKing Club points they earn from buying gas against the Wi-Fi service.
Posted by Glennf at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
At a cost of €1 million, Brussels puts in first of 20 Web kiosks with Wi-Fi: The cost seems quite extraordinary, but these are outdoor units designed to stand up to abuse and weather. They use touch sensitive screens for browsing, and have Wi-Fi built in for nearby use.
Posted by Glennf at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The U of O installed Wi-Fi beginning in 1999; 2,500 unique users in a 20,000-person student body in January: The university went full bore on Wi-Fi in 2002, and access is practically ubiquitous. They’re thinking about extending service out into community nearby as well, but not for general use. The university is in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon. (That’s OR-ih-gun not OREY-gone. What are you, some kind of hick?)
Posted by Glennf at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
c|net reviews SoniqCast’s Wi-Fi-enabled MP3 player: The device gets 7.7 out of 10 points for its good featureset, small form factor, and easy Wi-Fi configuration. The retail price at Best Buy is $300. Transfer speeds are quite slow — just a few hundred kilobits per second — whether via USB 1.1 or 802.11b Wi-Fi. WEP support is built in; WPA support due later this year. It has a FM receiver for that older form of wireless music transmission. It stores 1.5 gigabytes.
Posted by Glennf at 5:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Glenn Fleishman appears on The Exchange on New Hampshire Public Radio tomorrow: Tune in your crystal radios or click this link to listen live as I discuss wireless technology with the host of the program at 6 am Pacific/9 am Eastern on Wednesday. We have a wide-ranging agenda, part of which will focus on wireless broadband, given New Hampshire’s substantial non-urban population.
Update: The program is now archived as a RealAudio file or Windows Media file.
Posted by Glennf at 3:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Carol Ellison echoes and expands on sentiments that are rampant: fixed fees for hotspot reselling moderates risk: Ellison’s superb three-page column at eWeek.com analyzing why Wayport could succeed with its Wi-Fi World model through their existing partnerships, the reduced risk of success through fixed fees from many parties, and the value-added services that will keep Wayport in McDonald’s even if hotspot usage doesn’t skyrocket.
In an email exchange with a few colleagues today who follow the Wi-Fi and cell industries, the same themes emerged. Wayport has cut through the nonsense about Wi-Fi growth by building a model which has an upside based on the number of resellers, not the number of sessions they sell.
Posted by Glennf at 2:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
NPR reports on interference among legitimate radio uses: Morning Edition reports on conflicts between legitimate uses, such as a baby monitor poorly made that was appearing on military and AM/FM radio (they pulled the monitor off the market). It also explains how broadband-over-powerlines (BPL) might have an impact on licensed amateur radio. The excellent report covers how the FCC is improving its testing methods to observe interference.
Posted by Glennf at 8:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Business broadband wireless firm TowerStream adds antennas to Empire State Building: Steve Stroh reports that TowerStream now says it has nearly 100 percent availability in New York City for its service guarantee backed broadband wireless service. TowerStream has made a name for itself as a T-1 or faster replacement with fast rollout. In New York, this is an especially appealing offering, where aging facilities and other factors can produce long delays for high-speed business-grade data lines. TowerStream is not a Wi-Fi company, as Steve notes; they’re using technology designed for this task, but are often bringing backhaul to Wi-Fi hotspots.
Posted by Glennf at 5:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cingular says it will build UMTS, but needs spectrum first: The article doesn’t cite Cingular’s expected speed, but notes that the company will finish its EDGE (roughly 100 kbps) build-out by this summer. Merging with AT&T Wireless provides Cingular with that firm’s EDGE infrastructure, as well as the four trial cities for UMTS that AT&T Wireless has scheduled. UMTS service by Cingular might take until 2006 or 2007 for broad availability; testing begins in Atlanta this summer.
Posted by Glennf at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Tim Higgins covers Buffalo’s announcement of its “125” gear: This equipment uses the latest firmware and chips from Broadcom, which Buffalo very neatly clarifies has about 34 Mbps of throughput and 125 Mbps of signaling bandwidth. This is quite fair: it’s one of the clearer statements from any vendor about real-world performance of increasingly higher signaling rates, or rates at which symbols are encoded. Real throughput measures the actual data transferring end-to-end over the network.
Buffalo has its wireless gateway ready to go now for about $110 street price, Higgins notes. The unit supports all current security options. The CardBus (PC Card) and PCI cards will ship next month for about $100 list.
Each of the new Buffalo devices, plus some existing Buffalo equipment, will support its AOSS or AirStation One Touch Secure System. AOSS is supposed to set up an encryption key between a base station and a client adapter when you hold down a button for a few seconds on the access point and then run client software on the computer you’re connecting. I just spent 40 minutes with two fresh-out-of-the-box Buffalo units (the WBR2-G54 AirStation and WLI-CB-G54A PC Card) without reaching a successful conclusion. I’m talking to Buffalo about this to see where I went wrong. This obviously can’t be every user’s experience.
Buffalo also announced a partnership with my editorial and advertising partner, Jiwire. The Jiwire Portable Hotspot Locator will be bundled with the software distributed by Buffalo on CD.
Posted by Glennf at 3:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
During Wayport’s briefing yesterday, they shared key metrics about the company: It’s rare to see this much data from any hotspot provider, which goes to show the confidence Wayport has in its current and future businesses. The old saying is, never write your competitor’s business plan for them. Wayport fears no such animal, it’s clear, especially with its Wi-Fi World partnership model ahead of it.
In terms of core connections or 24-hour sessions, Wayport shows 124,000 in the first quarter of 2001, rising to 301,000 in first quarter of 2003, and 645,000 in the first quarter of this year. They estimate 714,000 connections for this current quarter, and over a million for third quarter. These connections include all direct and third-party pay-as-you-go and subscriber uses.
Wayport also provided its raw revenue figures for the last three year. The company started with $1.5 million received in 2002’s first quarter, rising consistently and steadily to $6.1 million in the first quarter of 2004. They estimate $6.7 million for second quarter, $8.7 million for third quarter, and over $10 million in the final quarter of 2004. The company’s CEO expected to produce about $1.5 to $2 million per week within 12 months for an annual runrate of $75 to $100 million.
Under Wi-Fi World, subscriber connections ostensibly won’t be counted because Wayport will receive fixed fees per venue regardless of connections. However, Wayport will still collect walk-up fees for two-hour sessions ($2.95 for two hours) which they will share with the retail venue.
Posted by Glennf at 1:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wall Street Journal says instructional television spectrum may be resold: This interesting article looks into the FCC’s exploration of reselling parts of the licensed band that’s used in a very limited fashion for instructional television. While originally assigned for that purpose, only a few institutions actually use it. Institutions are allowed to sublicense 95 percent of their spectrum as long as they’re broadcasting, and apparently, some groups broadcast meaningless content in order to bring in the revenue from the other licenses.
The FCC is licking its lips at the sweet spot in the 2.5-2.7 GHz range that comprises ITFS/MMDS (instructional television fixed service and multichannel multipoint distribution service). Nextel, Craig McCaw, and other companies have purchased sublicenses across the band.
The FCC proposal would reassign some spectrum for its own auctions, and allow educational entities to resell spectrum for new uses which could produce billions in revenue for the institutions. One scenario spun by an opponent is that California’s governor could sell ITFS spectrum to help balance the state budget.
Posted by Glennf at 1:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Wi-Fi Alliance updates standards, certifications: The new branding should make it clearer to consumers what’s available in a given unit. Tom’s Networking, through which we found this link, shows a version of the branding with more attractive colors.
In a related story, the group is also readying testing programs for IEEE 802.11i’s final form, which they will label WPA2, and for 802.11e’s Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME) to improve streaming media over Wi-Fi networks, which they will call WSM for Wireless Scheduled Media. The group is also considering certifying EAP types.
Posted by Glennf at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Airespace will offer multiple-in, multiple-out antennas for its access points later this year: The Intelligent RF Access Point (IRAP) will ship third quarter, and uses the MIMO technology to extend range. MIMO was pioneered by Airgo, which has not supplied the technology for IRAP; Airgo expects to have manufacturers incorporating their MIMO reference design in the next few months.
MIMO uses multiple input and output antennas to better sort out actual signal from noise, which can effectively extend range. It works best in combination with both client adapter and access point incorporating MIMO, but there are benefits for an access point by itself.
Airespace is effectively either reducing the number of access points an enterprise needs (although raising its per unit price tag), or offering better overlapping coverage in the same areas increasing throughput for a network.
Posted by Glennf at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Push-to-talk has become the must-have technology for cell phones; new Motorola equipment offers support over GPRS, 1xRTT, and WLAN: PTT provides an intercom-like service immediately, without dialing, for members of a group. Nextel owned the market until recently. Motorola’s technology is in testing, and they expect to offer support over a large variety of other cell data standards, too, such as EDGE.
Posted by Glennf at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
We’re not making this up: 64 percent of those surveyed about their Internet surfing habits admit to surfing in their underwear: At least it’s not in the altogether. Iogear’s survey, intended to promote some coverage of the company (viz., this item), had some interesting results though. 56 percent said they use Wi-Fi in hotels and airports while traveling (although the hotel usage has to be mostly wired in-room access), 27 percent in fast-food restaurants (which is odd, since McDonald’s is the only chain that has it that you’d call fast food), and 17 percent in bookstores.
Posted by Glennf at 9:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nepalese community wireless network helps sell, trade yaks: Villagers in remote Nepal are using a wireless network to communicate between where they live and where others take care of the yaks. They find out whether the tenders need medicine or assistance, and the herdspeople use NetMeeting to videoconference with their families. Several villages are hooked up with each other and out to the Internet. Distance learning is in the future.
Posted by Glennf at 6:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wayport will announce Tuesday a significant change in how hotspot builders charge hotspot resellers and aggregators: In a press and analyst briefing on Monday, Wayport disclosed Wi-Fi World, their name for a pricing model for partnering with retail chain stores and reselling access to aggregators and others for a fixed monthly fee per location instead of a per-connection rate. Resellers choose their own pricing for subscribers and do not share that revenue with Wayport.
In a clear swipe at T-Mobile’s arrangement with Starbucks, Borders, and Kinko’s, in which, according to many sources, the cell company bears the cost of the network and operations and shares revenue with its venues, Wayport’s CEO Dave Vucina said, that a retail partnership “shouldn’t be about how much they can get for free form the provider but should be more about their core business and driving enormous traffic for their core business.”
The current model for venue operators that resell access to their networks, such as Wayport, Surf and Sip, and Concourse, is to charge resellers a small, fixed fee for each daily connection to the provider’s network. Wayport’s resellers include iPass, Boingo, Sprint PCS, and Verizon Wireless, among others. While Wayport doesn’t disclose those fees, they are estimated to be from 25 cents to $1.00 per connection. The provider typically pays the venue about half of that connection fee, or subtracts that fee from monthly recurring billing, depending on how much of the installation costs the venue has paid and other factors.
Vucina said that in that model, the impetus has been on the hotspot provider or retail venue to drive traffic, as resellers with fixed monthly customer charges for unlimited usage had little upside. (iPass and GRIC charge metered rates for all services, and thus have a different cost basis.) But with Wi-Fi World, resellers that could include phone companies, cell operators, cable companies, service aggregators, Internet service providers, and firms outside telecom entirely—any firm with a large mobile customer base—can retain all subscriber fees regardless of usage by their customers.
In Wayport’s Wi-Fi World, resellers will pay $32 per month on average for each of the McDonald’s restaurants. Wayport expects to have about 8,000 McDonald’s restaurants in its next within 12 months, which would result in fees of roughly $250,000 per reseller per month or $3,000,000 per year. These fees could increase over time as usage increases, Vucina said, while venues with less traffic might have lower per location charges.
Wireless analyst John Yunker with Byte Level Research, who was briefed on the announcement, said “flat fees on the vendor side need to happen.” His initial reaction, he said, was that $32 per month per venue might be too high, and was concerned how regional telephone and cable companies would view the fees.
Wayport also said that as part of this model, McDonald’s is paying part of the installation and capital costs and a fixed monthly fee to have the service in place. Wayport has a four-year contract with McDonald’s. Because of McDonald’s franchise relationships, individual franchisees may choose other Internet options, but the parent company has an exclusive commitment and many franchised locations have signed on as part of this next year’s roll-out.
Wayport is not just providing public hotspot service, however, but it is also running the chain’s cashless transactions, such as credit-card verification, and will provide electronic training and other services in the future. McDonald’s hopes to reap millions of new or more frequent customers because of this new model’s potential to bring in home broadband and business broadband users through resellers.
Byte Level’s Yunker noted, “The additional applications riding on the network is vital to long-term success.”
As usage increases, Wayport has the option to raise its fees for service to McDonald’s, too. “After we would hit a certain threshold we would go back to the McDonald’s franchisee and ask for some additional compensation for circuit cost,” said Greg Williams, Wayport’s chief operating officer. Reseller fees may also increase over time.
McDonald’s stores will carry out extensive branding of the Wi-Fi service that includes Wayport’s logo and the logos of major partners. The branding will appear on lighted signs with the at-sign like “at-m” symbol McDonald’s has used for the last year, on the price board, on notices in the store, and on table coverings.
Further, Wayport’s network provider vendors will have the potential to receive branding on store signage and may resell use of the Wi-Fi World network for fees as well, which will offset Wayport’s costs of bringing Internet service to McDonald’s. “There’s a large branding element to this entire model,” Vucina said. “We want to advertise who’s providing that connectivity.” Wayport plans to install business-grade DSL with service guarantees rather than T-1 lines in most locations.
Wayport has a major reseller partner already signed which they have not yet announced. “We are very confident that with the fees that we are generating and our first signed partner that we are over the break-even mark with the first store that we install,” Vucina said. In another not-so-oblique reference to T-Mobile, Vucina said Wi-Fi World isn’t about installing a few thousand locations to reach scale, writing checks, and holding on for dear life. Rather, he said, it’s a sensible model for both venues and Wayport that “gets us in the black out of the gate.”
Wi-Fi World reduces overhead for all parties involved in the transaction, by our analysis at Wi-Fi Networking News. Wayport collects a simple, fixed monthly fee that varies only as locations in the network increase, while the reseller pays that fee regardless of usage. This eliminates fee settlement across networks for usage, as well as the accounting required for that and systems integration. Instead, authentication and account management becomes the primary cross-network requirement. In discussions with past and present hotspot operators, fee settlement accounting and billing and financial systems integration remains an expensive and high bar to roaming, and has been one reason why some networks have signed settlement-free bilateral roaming agreements.
Vucina said that Wayport’s intent is to provide partners like regional telephone companies a rate that allows them to bundle Wi-Fi as a fixed-fee service. In the current model, there’s no predictability about a user’s ultimate cost to the reseller, because the number of connections can vary by month. Heavy users could make dozens to hundreds of connections per month. But with a fixed per-venue fee, a telco could bundle Wi-Fi with DSL with a clear understanding of the margins and ongoing costs.
For instance, a provider with several million customers could offer unlimited Wi-Fi for $10 per month and with only 100,000 subscribers to the service still clear a considerable net before overhead each month. The service could also reduce customer turnover, a serious problem for cell carriers and cable and satellite companies.
One limitation Vucina said Wayport has imposed on this model is restricting its reseller partners from themselves reselling the service. They may not resell to any of a list of what Vucina called premium strategic partners that Wayport may want to work with directly.
Vucina also noted that while McDonald’s will not receive part of subscriber fees—and neither will Wayport—the fast-food giant will get a portion of walk-up fees. Wayport has previously said that it will charge $2.95 for two hours of access.
Wayport will also pay McDonald’s a share of fees received from its resellers when it exceeds what Vucina described as “X dollars” and did not elaborate on. This part of the agreement could potentially offset some or all costs that McDonald’s and its franchisees have agreed to pay.
The company expects to install 7,000 to 9,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the next nine to 12 months, based in part on where Internet service is available and the interest of franchisees. McDonald’s owns about 3,500 company stores, while another 9,000 are owned by a disparate group of 2,200 franchise holders who have some degree of autonomy. The deployment is limited to the U.S. for now, but Wayport is already talking about international stores.
Vucina said that approximately 18 million customers pass through the restaurants they plan to install in the first wave, which will be about 70 percent of the McDonald’s in each major city.
McDonald’s franchisees have expressed great interest in Wayport’s program partly for competitive reasons. “People that might have gone to Burger King yesterday and bought a Whopper without Wi-Fi, might very well go to McDonald’s tomorrow and buy a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Wi-Fi,” Vucina said. In a survey conducted during the McDonald’s Wi-Fi trials, three-quarters of the people surveyed who were using the in-store Wi-Fi came to the McDonald’s specifically because of the Internet access.
Dan Lowden, vice president of marketing at Wayport, said that McDonald’s franchisees have had great difficulty in obtaining a reasonable price for video surveillance, credit-card processing, and other services that Wayport will be able to offer as an integrated set of services using the Internet infrastructure that they are building.
Vucina said that Wayport plans to implement Wi-Fi World in several phases. Starting on Tuesday and for the next 90 days, Wayport will work to create its partnerships with network service providers, none of which have apparently been briefed on this version of the model yet. The following 90 days will see Wayport reworking its relationships with existing roaming partners. The next 90 to 180 days will focus on new roaming partners, such as cable companies.
Wayport’s current deployment plan of Wi-Fi World excludes its 800 hotel and airport installations. “We’re not ready to roll out our hotels, our airports yet under Wi-Fi World,” Vucina said. “We created this around the retail brand model.” But Vucina said the company views it as interesting possiblity for the future. “We’re working on it; we’re not ready yet.”
While Wayport is focused on reselling the entire network of locations, Vucina and Lowden emphasized in response to questions from reporters and analysts that they are entirely open to selling state-by-state or region-by-region selections to ISPs and regional telecoms. Vucina noted that they wouldn’t allow cherry-picking of specific locations or cities. “I don’t think we would ever be smaller than buying the stores in a state,” he said.
Providers such as Qwest and other regional companies would have the opportunity to resell both a regional plan for local customers and a national plan for roaming users to better manage costs across the entire network, the company said.
Wi-Fi World is Wayport’s invention, but Vucina said he is eager to work with other hotspot networks and resellers to make Wi-Fi World a more general approach to pricing in the industry. “We would like to see this platform be the method of choice with venues, partners, and providers,” he said. “If you were selling sandwiches or coffees, you would be very interested in this model.”
Specifically, he said in response to a question about T-Mobile’s network, he would welcome their competitor in talks. “We’d begin discussions today for a sensible Wi-Fi World model” with T-Mobile, Vucina said.
Vucina also released a substantial amount of information about Wayport’s revenue and connections during the briefing, which we will discuss in a separate report on Tuesday. The company is on track to gross over $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2004, and Vucina estimated Wayport could reach a run rate within 12 months that would translate into $75 to $100 million per year in revenue.
Wayport clearly believes that their agreement with McDonald’s can break a model that has restricted the interest in resellers from growing the customer base of Wi-Fi users. “You’d be hard pressed to find any sizeable retail brand vendor that has paid a provider for the services rendered, and I think that becomes an important component,” Vucina said.
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SanDisk continues to push combo envelope with 256 Mb and Wi-Fi in a single SD card: These cards still remain supported only by Pocket PC systems running Microsoft software, but it’s a great technical achievement. As we move into a time when it’s likely that digital cameras will offer driver-level support for Wi-Fi Compact Flash and similar memory cards, SanDisk could be poised to deliver their combo punch for that market. Some storage (at least temporary) coupled with the ability to transmit images.
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Tully’s and others figuring out next steps for Wi-Fi as Cometa slowly turns off the lights: You can tell how confusing the situation is when the Tully’s VP quoted in the story confuses AT&T with AT&T Wireless. AT&T had invested in Cometa; AT&T Wireless is merging with Cingular. (After which point, AT&T will regain the AT&T Wireless name, very likely, and resell Sprint PCS service under that brand!)
A Cometa spokesperson is quoted as saying McDonald’s award of its entire Wi-Fi installation to Wayport did not have anything to do with the decision by investors to end funding of Cometa. From what I have heard from various sources, this is correct. In fact, given their investment picture, had they bagged McDonald’s, they might still have found themselves in the same place.
The report says that AT&T withdrew its backing from the venture, but that’s incorrect. One division of AT&T that was reselling Cometa service stopped its reselling agreement, but the reporters imply this was connected to the investment side, which wasn’t the case. AT&T and IBM made token investments in the venture despite being listed as marquee partners. This may have hurt Cometa’s ability to raise money from other, small venture firms.
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A writer becomes curious about his California Zip code’s Wi-Fi penetration, and creates a map: Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal drives around for hours, picks up 3,000 hotspots in a population of 70,000 households, and then maps the results against income. His conclusion: Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous in urban areas that even though it’s not linked together, we have practically a seamless network already. (Tie that idea in with community mesh, and you’ve got ubiquitous access.) [link via Brian Chin]
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The Journal’s Nick Wingfield lays out the WiMax field, including the basis of its technology, its potential for rollout, and the current state of wireless broadband: Wingfield’s article is a solid portrayal of the state of the industry, including the likely date for real equipment being available in the U.S. (2006, he notes, which jibes with fellow editor Nancy Gohring’s research among WiMax-backin gcompanies), the market size, and the potential competition with cellular data and existing wireline services.
WiMax and its early relatives has the best potential in areas in which service is difficult to obtain (the prairie or Manhattan), wireline services offer limits to uploads and downloads far below a wireless broadband offering (at the edges of DSL coverage, for instance), or where wireless broadband is just plain cheaper. In some cases, early wireless broadband offers high speeds at cost that are the same or as little as half of competing wireline offerings.
I’m not bullish on WiMax’s mobile options, which are even further out in the future for deployment because by the time that standard is set, the cell companies will have had three or four years dealing with the first and probably second iterations of 3G cellular data. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi might blanket whole cities, an increasing trend. [link via Brian Chin]
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The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network project adds additional support: This mesh/cloud open-source project profiled here a few weeks ago now supports Atheros cards, and has ported their software to work on the Soekris 4526, a solid-state platform that can handle its hardware needs. Downloads are available immediately of the new software.
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Paul Andrews writes in The Seattle Times about the notion of a public coordinating board for municipal wireless: Andrews thinks that towns and cities could be well served by planning policies and deployment, whether public or public/private partnerships, to better ensure comprehensive coverage rather than a patchwork.
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Enterprises are reacting sensibly to the issue of low-speed (20 Mbps or slower) Wi-Fi interference techniques documented by Australian researchers: It’s not so much a flaw as a part of the spec that allows a certain kind of attack to disable an access point; there are many others of varying degree of severity, too, including just bringing an unpleasant 2.4 GHz cordless phone into an office and leaving it turned on without a connection to a cordless base station.
The reaction cited in this Computerworld article is sensible: managers are examining their risk and noting that with many access points, an attacker would have to attack numerous locations at once to have an effect, and would then be vulnerable to physical detection.
All 802.11a and any 802.11g networks running at faster encodings (using OFDM) can’t be attacked in this fashion, either.
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Profile of two Hawaiian businesses shows that cutting landlines decreases cost and increases connectivity: The trend might be starting to show where businesses can easily turn over from a wired landline PBX and cell phones outside of the office, to a Wi-Fi and optionally Ethernet based voice and data infrastructure in the office coupled with cellular voice and cellular data on the road.
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For those interested in navel gazing journalism, read my account of how Wi-Fi Networking News broke the Cometa Networks story: Other sites and publications were sometimes gracious, sometimes not about assigning us credit for having been the first to report on the event. Why does this matter? Because more and more breaking news important to the people particularly interested in the subject is appearing on Web logs, not in newspapers or on media Web sites. Trying to subtract from this forum and similar fora’s ability to report is an attempt to lessen the legitimacy of the work we’re doing here.
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Motorola’s Freescale division ups the ante on ultrawideband (UWB) by showing working demo of what’s to come this Christmas: The head of UWB innovator XtremeSpectrum, acquired by Motorola last year, is now director of Motorola subsidiary Freescale’s UWB division. Martin Rofheart showed a camcorder sending data over UWB to a plasma television, according to this second-hand report at Wi-Fi Planet.
Motorola’s version of UWB is still winding its way through the IEEE process, but literally every other company in the industry (most members of the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance) withdrew from 802.15.3a to develop standards through trade organizations.
By showing working products and promising Christmas 2004 products, Motorola has raised the bar. Some industry experts are convinced that Motorola hasn’t a chance at dominating the market, no matter how early they get in, because Intel, Texas Instruments, and many, many other firms will have competing products that all interoperate. Motorola’s consumer partners’ equipment will only work with other Motorola-based equipment.
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In two sizes at $1,000 and $1,500, the portable LCD uses a base station to access 802.11a, b, or g networks: The LocationFree Portable Broadband TV will ship this fall with two options: a 5 pound, 12.1-inch, 800 by 600 pixel display for $1,500, or a smaller 7-inch, 800 by 480 pixel unit for $1,000. The screens connect remote to a base station which has Ethernet, two USB ports, and an NTSC tuner, plus an infrared blaster needed to tune set-top boxes which don’t produce tunable signals.
Interestingly, the base station can feed content over the Internet if you have an upload speed of at least 300 Kbps on your local network. Sony can’t guarantee the quality of this kind of remote viewing, but has built early 802.11e-like support for quality of service (QoS) packet prioritization and scheduling for crisp local viewing, according to the report. The larger unit has a Compact Flash slot; the smaller, a Memory Stick slot. The portables can view images stored on those cards.
Oddly, the article doesn’t mention battery life, but a posting from earlier this year on AkibaLive notes that it has a lithium-ion battery that offers 100 to 180 minutes of viewing on a charge depending on the unit’s brightness setting.
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A pig, a cow, a camera, some coffee—and thievery: There’s got to be a category that’s uniquely unique, as much as an oxymoron as that might sound. Nigel Ballard sends the following combination police blotter, glimpse in the future, and Wi-Fi report from Portland, where he helps build out community wireless networking hotspots as part of Personal Telco:
I’m on a new steering committee! This’ll make it three in total.
The Pig & Cow Steering Committee differs from the others, not only because it has a way more interesting title, but also because there are livestock involved, albeit the plastic variety.
Confused? OK, some background is needed.
Urban Grind is a coffee house with a difference, home to Personal Telco and a whole host of other community-related happenings. You need to hang there to see how very different it is from the sterility encountered in those national coffee houses.
A few months back two plastic animals appeared on the countertop. Namely, a pig and a cow. People waiting for their drinks started posing the animals, and then customers slipped in extra characters and even props to create scenes ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre.
Along comes Intel’s People & Practices Research Group who have been watching the way the free Wi-Fi access from Oregon non-profit Personal Telco was changing the clientele, attracting customers from miles away, and creating a real sense of community, communication and interaction in this large and comfortable space.
Many of the customers at UG actually talk to each other; they learn each others names, enquire about lives, loves and job searches, amazing!
Intel asked Urban Grind if they could install some fun technology, Brenda and Macker, the proprietors said “Sure, knock yourself out”.
Intel duly installs a camera, an LCD monitor, a big blue button, a tiny web server and a wireless client to connect their server through the Personal Telco Wi-Fi to the outside world.
The idea is this. You are invited to pose the characters, bring in some of your own, and even add a prop. Hit the big blue button, the image appears on the LCD monitor and shortly thereafter they also appear online at the web site for all to see.
Cool beans, but “why” I hear you ask.
Intel says “We’d like to help people get marginally more enjoyment out of Urban Grind, or get to know other patrons a little better, or feel a little more attachment to the place. What’s all this “ubiquitous computing” good for if it can’t help us get value out of it in our daily lives?”
So it isn’t about the technology per se, more as a tool to get people off their chairs, out from behind their books and to step up to the counter and get creative, to communicate, to be a part of something silly and social. Now I defy you to tell me how that could be anything but a good thing?
NEWS FLASH, NEWS FLASH, NEWS FLASH..
Someone stole the Pig and the Cow! I hear you gasp in disbelief. Have no fear, all is not lost. Portland’s finest have descriptions of our missing movie stars, and are on the case.
Meanwhile back at UG Central, we are reliably informed that local toy stores are well stocked with doppelgangers keen to take up from where the original actors left off. Alas poor pig and cow, I knew them well!
See the story unfold: http://www.sstanamera.com/~UG/index.php
About Intel: People and Practices Research Group, a small group of social scientists and designers at Intel Corporation, are engaged in a series of studies trying to understand the effects and possibilities for technology to create communities “in place.” With the internet in the 1990s came the rise of “virtual communities” and the declaration of “the death of distance.” But we are human beings who inhabit and value our physical spaces as well. What can new technologies enable in terms of physical communities, how can technology create a “sense of place?” Our goal is to understand how people go about creating a sense of place, and how new technologies such as Wi-Fi, embedded sensors and actuators, large and shared displays, and other technologies might contribute.
About Personal Telco: We are a volunteer group of Portlanders who believe that 802.11 (wireless networking, or “Wi-Fi”) technology is both cool and empowering. We started out by turning our own houses and apartments into wireless hot spots (also referred to as “nodes”), and then set about building these nodes in public locations such as parks and coffee shops. Currently we have over 110 active nodes, and we eventually would like to cover the entire city of Portland, Oregon with even more. We are here to promote and build public wireless networks through community support and education. Personal Telco Project is a Federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and an Oregon non-profit organization. We want to facilitate partnerships with local businesses, and in doing so permit the raising of funds though tax-deductible contributions.
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British Telecom will deploy a Vodafone handset that switches from cellular to a local broadband connection at homes, offices: Project Bluephone would ostensibly use Bluetooth to handle the cell to broadband swapover when within the range of a local base station, and then transmit voice over that connection out to BT. Details are a little hazy about how well this will work in homes: Bluetooth typically runs at its 1 Mbps speed only within 30 to 100 feet, even with the more powerful flavor of Bluetooth. [via Engadget]
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KT is nearly doubling its hotspot network from 12,000 current locations to 23,000 by the end of the year: Korea spent publicly to build a broadband infrastructure, and that’s paid rewards with 71 percent of the population having high-speed service. 8 Mbps DSL costs as little as $20 before tax and equipment and a Wi-Fi subscription is as low as $9 for DSL subscribers. KT is now also selling cell/Wi-Fi handsets; they sold 2,000 in the first two weeks it was offered.
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Some Internet service providers allow connections to be shared, but they’re few and far between: I mentioned in passing yesterday that Speakeasy Networks was the only ISP to encourage sharing access to anyone and everyone for any of their personal or business DSL and T-1 accounts. Dana Spiegel of NYCwireless wrote in to note that three New York providers allow sharing.
He also pointed to PersonalTelco’s run-down on ISPs and their sharing policies, but the information is largely out of date, or includes ISPs as allowing sharing which have only confirmed this by phone or in email but not in their AUP. EFF had a list as well which they’ve intended to update for two years, and may happen soon. I don’t take a statement from an ISP via email or by phone that sharing is permitted as legitimate: it has to be in the publicly posted terms of service.
NYCwireless lists Bway.Net, Cloud9.Net, and Ace DSL. I checked their terms of service to see how they word it. Bway.net explicitly allows it, but you have to notify them to be legit. Cloud9.Net doesn’t really state you can share, and you can read their terms to state you can’t. They say, in summary: The customer may permit a member of their immediate household to use the customer’s account subject to the account holder’s supervision and the customer agrees that Cloud 9 reserves the right to prevent other Internet users from accessing its network, either in part or in whole, for any reason. Ace’s policies are even vaguer, making it a gray issue that you can share a connection. But they do say In conjunction with the terms of Section “III c.”, above, I agree not to resell any of the Services provided hereunder or the passwords thereto; Speakeasy allows resale of any part of any connection.
Updates: Oregon’s Easystreet allows noncommercial sharing of their DSL service. Their page clearly says its an experiment, and they’re working with Personal Telco to see if this concept works.
Butler Networks of Tennessee specifically allows noncommercial wireless sharing, too. Their agreement is very specific, saying you can’t accept money or trade services in exchange for offering wireless access via your account, but that’s perfect for community networking and other free public hotspots.
You can help compile a newer list of sharing-friendly ISPs: email me if you’re an ISP that specifically allows sharing in your usage agreement or if you work with such an ISP. Please include a link to the terms of service Web page for confirmation.
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Earthlink will offer Internet access to customers in Northern California through a deal with Digitalpath Networks, a wireless ISP: Digitalpath uses a proprietary system to deliver the access. It had better be a pretty cheap proprietary system because it requires technicians to install antennas on customer homes. The cost of such installs is commonly blamed for the failure of the MMDS market in the ’90s. Since then, many wireless ISPs in non-rural areas have targeted the more lucrative business market because of the expense of building and installing network equipment.
Earthlink has been one of the most bullish big players to pursue broadband wireless opportunities. It has made similar wireless offerings in the Atlanta area through partners.
On a side note, shame on Cnet for this line: “Wireless broadband, commonly called WiMax.” Come on folks, not all wireless broadband is WiMax and in fact, WiMax gear doesn’t exist. It sounds like Digitalpath is using a technology that is nothing like WiMax.
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Austin Wireless City worked with the City of Austin to build a hotspot in Republic Square Park: The two have also partnered for hotspots at One Texas Center and city hall. Republic Square is the first of four Austin parks to get wireless. The City of Austin is apparently really supportive of Austin Wireless City projects, which will only encourage more Wi-Fi in Austin.
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Athens IT contractor finds Wi-Fi too prone to denial of service at present: The Atos Origin manager for the games didn’t stress security issues like actual break-ins. Rather, he was concerned about the likelihood of attempted attacks that they would have to analyze, and the potential of a single idiot to jam signals. These are unfortunately reasonable concerns at present—it’s all too easy to produce junk 2.4 GHz signals or to automate denial of service attacks that deassociate other clients.
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Survey says that most business travelers would opt for a train over a car or plane ride if Wi-Fi were available: Fifty percent of existing business train travelers already carry a laptop, the survey found, and most already work during train trips making calls or handling electronic files. Users would pay up to £12 (about US$20) for longer trips.
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David Pogue wonders if the concern about Wi-Fi security is at too high a pitch for home users: Pogue’s email column, archived online, this week questions whether there’s too much focus on security. Now, I’m the first to agree with him that people with home wireless networks that aren’t near neighbors have nothing to fear. Even if you have near neighbors, enabling WEP or WPA, as Pogue recommends, lowers your risk from low to nil. (WEP’s key weakness that enables a cracker to break a key and access a network could require weeks of network monitoring to extract enough data to carry that out. It’s only a quick crack on high-usage business Wi-Fi networks.)
But Pogue doesn’t separate out different risk scenarios. My colleague and co-author on The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, Adam Engst, wrote an excellent essay on how to decide the level of exposure you have and how to mitigate it which parallels Pogue on the home networking side, but is more granular on risks outside the home network.
Pogue opens his piece talking about public Wi-Fi: “It’s just so glorious to be standing in an airport, hotel lobby or city street, open your laptop, and discover that you can go online at cable-modem speeds without hooking up a single cable.” But the rest of his column focuses on home networking risks where I generally agree with his take and his recommendations.
Out in the wild, the risks are quite high that someone could be monitoring an open free or fee-based Wi-Fi hotspot network — it’s probably 1,000 to 10,000 times more likely that someone is using software to monitor a hotspot than a home network. I have a piece of software that I can run that automatically captures all passwords passing over any network connection, Wi-Fi or otherwise, that requires me to press a single keystroke to activate. You should never conduct unsecured transactions over public hotspots using FTP, email, or the Web for this reason: it requires no effort to capture those passwords, and people may capture them idly.
At the very least, your email password should be secured via APOP (authenticated POP), which creates a one-time use token for access. Your email would still pass in the clear, but your password would be protected. Better, try to use SSL for email (POP and SMTP), or read your email with a Web browser using an SSL connection. Fastmail.fm and Google’s beta Gmail both allow secure email reading; some ISPs certainly must offer SSL-based Webmail, too. Community wireless group NYCWireless now offers SSL Webmail, IMAP, POP, and SMTP to its dues-paying members.
Pogue focuses on the data that’s being transferred as being at risk and not being very interesting. My colleague Adam does the same. They’re both right. What sniffers want it isn’t your private email but your passwords because then they can break into email accounts, conduct transactions using your eBay account (your password is probably the same, right?), and otherwise hijack parts of your life that allow them to commit fraud. These sniffers are, in fact, well advised to haunt Wi-Fi hotspots because they can harvest that information so readily.
Pogue does quote a Linksys product manager saying that only a skilled hacker could access files on your system, which is quite strange. Even under Windows XP, you can set up password-free shared folders that anyone can access on a local network, whether a home network or a public Wi-Fi network. It doesn’t require special software to mount those shares, and many people seem to still use this option for their own ease.
Pogue closes the column with sensible advice for protecting one’s computers on a local network, and this advice goes towards protecting it from attacks over the Internet, from crackers who hop on your home Wi-Fi network, and from ne’er-do-wells at public hotspots: turn off services you don’t need, choose good passwords, keep your system patched.
His concern seems to be that users could wind up too anxious about using Wi-Fi networks when most of the security advice is better aimed at roaming users or corporate users. And he’s right. The best advice should differentiate between simple steps for home users, and more sophisticated advice for others at higher risk as in this Jiwire article on security.
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Intermediary device turns any digital camera into a Wi-Fi-enabled transmitter and storage device (reg. required): In Thursday’s New York Times, I write about Wi-Pics, a portable device that connects to a digital camera’s Compact Flash slot on one side and a Wi-Fi network on the other. It ships in June for $1,700 with additional fees for a 40 Gb hard drive and bar-code scanner, and it appears to fit a niche that certain kinds of professional photographers are hard-pressed to find an alternative for today.
A few technical details that didn’t make it into the Circuits article: Wi-Pics uses Atheros chips and an Intel Xscale processor. It can make secure, encrypted connections over FTP and the Web for storage. It has a Compact Flash slot built in as well as the option of adding a hard drive. The cable from the Compact Flash adapter to the Wi-Pics uses a flat profile so that you can close a Compact Flash door (which many digital cameras require to be closed to operate) and not hurt the cable. The cable connects through a tripod mount to a thicker cable that runs to the camera.
While my article focused on some of the more typical uses that professionals might find for this camera, I’m also interested in how Wi-Fi starts percolating into individual application devices instead of multi-purpose computers and handhelds. With the cost of Wi-Fi dropping and with Wi-Fi SD and Compact Flash cards available, it’s a short matter of time before $500 to $1000 cameras will support Wi-Fi cards.
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With the slow rundown of Cometa’s clock starting today, which companies remain standing?: I do have a little ego, and my article in Feb. 2001 in The New York Times was the first comprehensive piece written in a major publication about the nascent Wi-Fi hotspot industry. Several companies were striving to raise funds into the mouth of the dotcom collapse, which claimed bloated business plans or too early attempts to capitalize on a technology that only a small number of laptop users had access to.
While researching the story in Dec. 2000, I spoke to the chief marketing officer of the Aerzone division of Softnet. Three days after I spoke to him, Softnet pulled the plug because they couldn’t raise the funds to perform the build out that they’d contracted with airlines and airports to handle.
The firms I interviewed for the article were Wayport, Surf and Sip, Global Digital Media, AirWave, SkyLink (not quoted), and MobileStar. Let’s start in reverse order. What’s clear from examining each of these firms is that execution and timing mattered as much in 2001 as they do today: controlling costs and building out a robust network in the right place can only go so far: users who pay are still required.
MobileStar: While initially well funded, MobileStar had extremely high run rates. I’s technical standards were top notch, but expensive, and expenses ran far ahead of any potential revenue. They went bankrupt late in 2001 and had their assets purchased by T-Mobile HotSpot. The company reportedly went through as much as $90 million in investment income while producing no more than a couple million in revenue. T-Mobile has continued to use its brand name and high-level partnerships to run what is generally considered to be an excellent network that’s overprice for day use, but not far out of scale on their unlimited monthly plans with one-year commitment.
Sky.Link Internet Plus: A promising Canadian firm with hotel and airports service, the company disappeared abruptly a few months after my article came out. It resurfaced briefly with fewer locations before taking a final plunge. Its history and disappearance are a mystery.
AirWave: AirWave was a small San Francisco Bay Area set of hotspots in restaurants and coffeeshops that decided that the software they’d written to manage access points was a better product than the hotspot business. In 2002, they exited hotspots, spinning off their locations to WiFi Metro, which had the same investors as hereUare. (WiFi Metro and hereUare were sold to Ikano, which operates a truly bizarre set of locations as Hotspotzz, including KOA campgrounds, a few Subway restaurants in Washington state, and hotels in Montreal. Hotspotzz also has the most egregious press release announcements in the industry.) AirWave is apparently thriving selling access point management software that allows heterogenous installations of gear from many manufacturers to be managed centrally through a single piece of software. (Sputnik, like AirWave, dropped out of hotspots long ago and moved into developing a software and firmware platform for managing access points across a network.)
Global Digital Media: With a strong and nimble presence, GDM had Wi-Fi kiosks and service in Philadelphia and Boston airports, and a contract in hand to use CNN’s airport news service coax cable to bring in more service to dozens of additional airports. They seemed poised to become a dominant airport provider. Then, they disappeared without a trace in mid-2001, probably unable to raise additional funds.
Surf and Sip: Scrappy Rick Ehrlinspiel seemed like a go-getter when I met him in Dec. 2000, and he’s still scrappy, though tired, after four years of traveling the world and building out several hundred Surf and Sip locations in places as varied as his home base of San Francisco and as far-flung as the Czech Republic and Poland. Rick has consistently maintained that the privately held firm turns locations profitable within months, and has the cash to continue self-funding its rollout. Rick has aggressively offered bilateral fee-free roaming deals with other networks, such as Canada’s FatPort, to extend Surf and Sip’s reach.
Wayport: Let’s leave the best for last. Wayport was founded to put Ethernet into hotel rooms, and still derives most of its revenue from that business. But it’s changing. With 12,000 McDonald’s under contract to get Wi-Fi service, thousands of UPS Store locations that they’ll operate for SBC as a managed services provider, and a network of hotels and airports that will top 1,000 this year, Wayport is the last brand standing. Wayport has raised as much as $100 million in funding across its five-plus years in business.
Other apparently thriving hotspot operators and aggregators — apparently because most are privately held — include STSN, which started with Marriott hotels and now has 1,900 locations built or under contract; FatPort, with a platform they resell and hotspots they operate across Canada; Boingo Wireless, reselling its software to business service divisions and end users for aggregating hotspot access; and iPass, with aggregated worldwide access to dial-up, broadband, and Wi-Fi service. GRIC is also an aggregator along the same lines as iPass, but with fewer Wi-Fi locations.
AirPath and NetNearU continue to sell their platform and network service which allows individual locations to enable for-fee service and network resellers to build hotspot operations and tie them together through their respective authentication and billing systems. Even more platforms, roaming enablers, and networks exist outside the U.S., in numbers that grow daily.
Other failures include most recently Cometa and Toshiba, both of which lost out in the McDonald’s trials to Wayport; and Joltage, which had a strange grassroots plan.
I had thought SOHOWireless was in this category, but they said via email despite the 2001 copyright date on their page listing a handful of locations (which are described as “initial locations” this many years later) that they’re still kicking and are working hard on the next release of their LANRoamer 2 software platform.
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An apartment resident worked with his landlord to build out good Wi-Fi coverage for free Internet access—but did he read the Comcast contract?: The page documents how “JC” worked with his landlord to build out ubiquitous coverage for the complex, incidentally benefitting himself by eliminating his personal monthly broadband bill. But he notes they’re paying $60 per month to Comcast for their Internet feed, and at that rate, Comcast isn’t offering shared Internet access in this fashion. Comcast clearly only allows use by people in the same household, and used to charge extra per machine and try to restrict sharing by locking down use to a single Ethernet adapter address.
Given the promotion that JC’s story has gotten, how long is it before either Comcast shuts them down or Speakeasy Networks steps in and offers free access in exchange for promotion? Speakeasy remains the only national ISP that I’m aware of that encourages the shared use of personal or business DSL and T1 connections at all prices. [link via BoingBoing and Nigel Ballard]
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While Quarterscope pursues worldwide wardriving to build its virtual GPS database, the open-source Herecast project expects more grassroots contributions: A few weeks ago, we wrote about Quarterscope, a company which combines a database of wardriving-based GPS and Wi-Fi access point data with live information from a Wi-Fi card to produce a virtual GPS. Mark Paciga wrote in to point to his nascent effort, Herecast, which is an open-source project to develop a similar resource that’s a little more open-ended as to goals. It can combine mapping, location information (you are here/you are near…), and friend finding.
The system doesn’t use GPS mapping either on the input side or output side, but rather tries to use wayfinding through naming of familiar places in the vicinity. Paciga notes that it only took a few hours to mock up functional demos. It’s available now as a Pocket PC beta, but he hopes to port it to Windows XP as well.
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Reports today provide more detail on Cometa Networks’ shutdown: In news broken here yesterday, Cometa Networks will cease operations. Several publications provide more insight into what happened and what will happen to existing venues.
Richard Shim of News.com offers good analysis that scale and resale are the only ways in which hotspot networks can spread out expense and have enough usage. One analyst notes what is becoming a refrain: Wi-Fi service has to be an add-on package for existing offerings, not a standalone subscription.
Seattle reporter John Cook of The Post-Intelligencer talks to Cometa’s venue and reseller partners, who were taken by surprise and are sorting through how to proceed.
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Vivato gear enabled a hot zone in Montreal that otherwise would have been much more difficult