Free public access WiFi - good idea or not?

meejawhore

Hi,

Just wanted to guage opinion here. What is the feeling towards free public access WiFi services, as occasionally touted for Dublin, and installed in California, Bologna, etc? (Via access points on lamposts, I think)

Are they universally a good idea or will they, as most broadband providers claim, hamper the roll-out and improvement of commercial broadband services?

I can see where the commericial opposition is coming from, but can you guys see any drawbacks?

Thanks

daveyjoe

Just my opinion but in big cities like Dublin, free wi-fi would have very little or no effect on rollout or the improvement of commercial broadband services. If anything they will force the providers to offer more competitive packages.

Cryos

daveyjoe wrote:

Just my opinion but in big cities like Dublin, free wi-fi would have very little or no effect on rollout or the improvement of commercial broadband services. If anything they will force the providers to offer more competitive packages.

It would be a good idea i think, i know myself i do alot of work in and around dublin sometimes and the laptop is always at my side; there used to be moments where i needed to download something (drivers or software) and couldnt. (That was untill i got 3g vodafone datacard)

On the second point Competition is good for the consumer.

probe

The main problem with many WiFi internet access points (free or fee charging) in Ireland is their dysfunctionality. By this I mean, either:

a) they are located in places where it is not practical to use WiFi

examples: Cork City Council’s city centre-wide system http://www.smarttelecom.ie/products/meshhopper/ – there are very few places to sit down to use your appliance. Try surfing the net on your laptop standing up in Patrick Street! Even with a PDA it is difficult and there are no real-time information services one can access that would make wifi on the move useful (eg public transport arrival information, real-time traffic maps showing heavily congested streets in red (they have these data available on the traffic signal management system derived from loop detectors – why not publish it to the web?).

There are very few car parking spaces on streets where the service is available and it doesn’t work in most public multi-story car parks (where a sales rep on the road could conveniently check his e-mail or connect to the office network over a vpn while sitting in his car).

In many Irish hotels that purport to offer Wifi, the service is not widely available throughout the establishment. In many hotels one has to linger in the reception area or some other awkward heavily trafficked space to get a connection. They could just as easily make wifi available in a number of rooms so that one could specify a wifi enabled room when reserving. Wifi is quite useful in the dining room where the business traveller on his own can read the newspapers from back home on his PDA while waiting to be served!

b) inappropriate tariff charging for use of the service

i) tariffs that you can’t “pause” - eg you buy 60 minutes and have to use it all up in one sitting or it runs out
ii) Outrageous pricing generally
iii) On Cork’s street mesh-hopper system you get 4 hours for €5 which while it may be acceptable in a hotel room is not practical to use on the street!

c) Lack of WiFi point of presence information – so people don’t know the service is available right where they are and won’t use it.

d) Where re-login is offered, it is often inconvenient to enter a ten digit voucher number and a four digit pin every time. It would be just as secure and far more convenient to give people the option of bookmarking a starting point webpage with an authentication cookie associated with it.

e) While WiFi in Switzerland isn’t generally free, if you buy time on Swisscom’s system, you can use the same prepaid account in your hotel room, in conference areas, in the dining room, in many railway stations, in motorway service areas while parked in your car or in the cafeteria, in larger office buildings, at the airports and many other locations. At this level of availability it becomes useful. WiFi availability is too fragmented to be of much use in Ireland.

Finally I can’t see that free public street Wifi in Dublin will do any damage to other providers – unless the local authorities also put blanket coverage of residential areas – and even then it won’t reach very far into buildings.

probe

bk

Having used the Google free wifi in San Francisco I must say it is a great idea. From the point of view of a tourist or business traveller it is very useful, allowing you to look up maps and public transport, etc. It definitely makes the city far more attractive.

However it really isn't any major competition to commercial operators. It simply isn't fast enough or stable enough for anything other then a bit of light surfing.

I also agree that makes commercial operators deliver better services, rather then just a base service. For instance it is widely believed that Vodafone released their new HSDPA service in response to the competition from wifi.

BTW Patrick St in Cork has lots of places to sit, all those cement slabs on the street are there for sitting. Also there are lots of bars, restaurants or cafes on or just off Patricks St where you can easily sit and use the wifi.

probe

bk wrote:

Having used the Google free wifi in San Francisco I must say it is a great idea. From the point of view of a tourist or business traveller it is very useful, allowing you to look up maps and public transport, etc. It definitely makes the city far more attractive.

I'm sure it is great for tourists. There is no WiFi service on the French autoroutes, and so I often find myself heading for the car park of the nearest accorhotels.com hotel to get my "internet business" done.

I also agree that makes commercial operators deliver better services, rather then just a base service. For instance it is widely believed that Vodafone released their new HSDPA service in response to the competition from wifi.

I find that Vodafone (and Telefonica/O2)'s 3G voice and data service quality in IRL is awful in many locations. WiFi is a far better solution where available.

BTW Patrick St in Cork has lots of places to sit, all those cement slabs on the street are there for sitting. Also there are lots of bars, restaurants or cafes on or just off Patricks St where you can easily sit and use the wifi.

The courts.ie "sponsored" wifi hotspot on the steps of the courthouse on Washington St seems to do far more business! Ambiance and space matter.

probe

bk

probe wrote:

I find that Vodafone (and Telefonica/O2)'s 3G voice and data service quality in IRL is awful in many locations. WiFi is a far better solution where available.

Vodafone are starting to rollout thier new HSDPA service (next gen 3g) and from reports here it seems to work really well. So I can see this growing into a very good service in a few years.

watty

Technically 3G and HSDPA and even GSM edge are FAR better mobile / public solutions.

WiFi best suits 5 to 10 users indoors in a small area. That is what it was designed for.

Next year there may be more public / moble Internet soultions not based on WiFi.

My view is that traditional WiFi is past its sell by for outdoor use and the big growth will be in home for wireless pocket MP3 players (Internet "radio" or home PC stored music), home media systems, laptops and PDAs. With some office growth, but 100Mbps full duplex lan on switch cabled to each desk is up to 20 times performance of even 125 Mbps Wifi shared, so offices will make light use of WiFi.

At the last big wireless expo I was at the really big players / successful companies had non-Wifi gear (mostly licenced) for outdoor and only indoor Wifi. The gaggle of small companies offering packaged up WiFi for outdoor use will be gone in two or three years.

Wimax is overhyped, but the mobile/portable version will arrive next year too and the fixed version is available a while now.

I think outdoor Mesh WiFi networks are almost unmanagable and now obsolete. I can think of FIVE portable/Mobile wireless systems that can be bought today apart from Wimax, GSM/Edge and 3G/HSDPA.
Ripwave, IPW's CDMA, QFT's F-OFDM, ZTE's CDMA (similar to IPW), iBurst.

They can all to vaguely similar datarate to outdoor WiFi with 10 users. Some will scale to 100s of users and higher speed that is inreality possible with 5 to 10 users on WiFi.

probe

bk wrote:

Vodafone are starting to rollout thier new HSDPA service (next gen 3g) and from reports here it seems to work really well. So I can see this growing into a very good service in a few years.

HSDPA is probably OK now when a small number of people are using it, in a relatively flat area such as Dublin city. It has scalability limitations in terms of the data transportation capacity per cell and is not therefore a DSL or fibre alternative for wide-scale home or office use, particularly in the context of increasing multi-media use of the net. Ignoring the political and health and safety acceptability of a huge increase in UMTS cellsites that would be required. The smaller cell sizes limit 3G based solutions to higher traffic locations – i.e. it won’t provide much broadband infill in rural areas where eircom refuse to make DSL available.

HSDPA is stuck therefore in the “business mobility” end of the market, offering a bit more capacity. Meanwhile WiMax is better (eg higher speeds) at serving someone while they are not moving. Most people are not moving when they are working in “data mode” – they are sitting on a park bench, in their car, at home etc. Even on trains, existing WiMax technology can be used to provide internet service to passengers (using WiFi within the carriages for the last 100m).

The important issue from a regulatory perspective is to keep WiMax licensed spectrum away from 3G license holders – we’ve seen how GSM2 networks in many European countries have built up large WiFi operations in hotels etc, to keep the price of mobile data use exorbitant.

probe

watty

Yes I think I heard that a cell/sector can only support 7 users on HSPDA at high speeds. But WiFi certainly isn't scalable.

watty

If you have huge number of SMALL UMTS cells, then it gets safer.

mayhem#

watty wrote:

Technically 3G and HSDPA and even GSM edge are FAR better mobile / public solutions.

WiFi best suits 5 to 10 users indoors in a small area. That is what it was designed for.

Next year there may be more public / moble Internet soultions not based on WiFi.

My view is that traditional WiFi is past its sell by for outdoor use and the big growth will be in home for wireless pocket MP3 players (Internet "radio" or home PC stored music), home media systems, laptops and PDAs. With some office growth, but 100Mbps full duplex lan on switch cabled to each desk is up to 20 times performance of even 125 Mbps Wifi shared, so offices will make light use of WiFi.

At the last big wireless expo I was at the really big players / successful companies had non-Wifi gear (mostly licenced) for outdoor and only indoor Wifi. The gaggle of small companies offering packaged up WiFi for outdoor use will be gone in two or three years.

Wimax is overhyped, but the mobile/portable version will arrive next year too and the fixed version is available a while now.

I think outdoor Mesh WiFi networks are almost unmanagable and now obsolete. I can think of FIVE portable/Mobile wireless systems that can be bought today apart from Wimax, GSM/Edge and 3G/HSDPA.
Ripwave, IPW's CDMA, QFT's F-OFDM, ZTE's CDMA (similar to IPW), iBurst.

They can all to vaguely similar datarate to outdoor WiFi with 10 users. Some will scale to 100s of users and higher speed that is inreality possible with 5 to 10 users on WiFi.

Your opinion is so badly informed and opinionated that it;s almost laughable...

E.

lucernarian

mayhem# wrote:

Your opinion is so badly informed and opinionated that it;s almost laughable...

E.

Have you come here to provide an interesting discussion on this important topic (for rural AND urban broadband) or have a "yore stoopid" trolling session?

Snaga

Ah free WiFi. So, who pays for it? A simple access point outside a courthouse is handy enough - but city wide wifi? It would require hundreds of radios, most/many fed by ADSL lines to support a spread like that through an urban landscape and retain decent throughput.

Here is googles attempt - http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/apmap.html

Pretty good - still some black holes in it though with all them radios.

The only way to make it cost effective is to have the local authorities pay for it. Then as mentioned it should be useable for a whole host of things - parking meters, ip cameras, internet/data access on the move for local police/fire fighters and other public services that would require it 'on the move'. The local authority could also provide convenient places to put the radios at no cost.

Even Google had to use public lights for most of their radios, otherwise they would be shelling out money to property owners to pay for 'radio hosting'.

Have the local authority pay for the build (They retain ownership) but have an ISP (or group of ISP's) operate it on their behalf. If an ISP isnt up to the job - switch them out for one that is.

The main point being - someone has to be paying for the build, operation and maintenance of the network (No trivial cost) or it will deteriorate drastically over time - the local authority being the obvious choice as it could be used by their employees in a useful manner every day. The extra capacity could then be given to Joe Public as free Internet access.

cgarvey

mayhem# wrote:

Your opinion is so badly informed and opinionated that it;s almost laughable...

If you have nothing to say, then say... urm, nothing!

jwt

An opinionated opinion??????

And I was slagged for Annual AGM


John

mayhem#

OK, I was a bit strapped for time earlier but to apease all of you here I will respond in a bit more detail...

WiFi best suits 5 to 10 users indoors in a small area. That is what it was designed for.

Wifi was indeed originally designed for indoor/LAN use. However as access it is based on a radio-signal this signal can be propogated by a variety of means (amplifiers, antenna etc.) and settings such as ack-timing can be adjusted to accomodate use over a larger area. The number of users is only as limited as the type of AP used. While AP's in the early stages of Wifi (10 years or so ago) were only able of handling 5-10 users modern hardware and software is capable of handling a multitude of this...

Next year there may be more public / moble Internet soultions not based on WiFi.

No need to wait until next year, there are already alot of mobile internet solutions avaible. However none come with the affordability or client penetration of Wifi..

My view is that traditional WiFi is past its sell by for outdoor use and the big growth will be in home for wireless pocket MP3 players (Internet "radio" or home PC stored music), home media systems, laptops and PDAs. With some office growth, but 100Mbps full duplex lan on switch cabled to each desk is up to 20 times performance of even 125 Mbps Wifi shared, so offices will make light use of WiFi.

You start of about outdoor wifi and then switch to indoor/LAN use. What are you really trying to say?

At the last big wireless expo I was at the really big players / successful companies had non-Wifi gear (mostly licenced) for outdoor and only indoor Wifi. The gaggle of small companies offering packaged up WiFi for outdoor use will be gone in two or three years.

Yup, that's what the "big boys" have been spinning for years now. In the meantime the growth and succes of companies such as Alvarion, Strix and others tells a different story. That combined with the ever continuing growth in large wifi deployments and VC invetsments in Wifi companies clearly indicates that Wifi is far from dead..

Wimax is overhyped, but the mobile/portable version will arrive next year too and the fixed version is available a while now.

Yes Wimax is indeed overhyped and will not be replacing wifi in the near future. While both standards are ratified now they have only been ratified in a very stripped down version. Features and inter-operability are a long way away...

I think outdoor Mesh WiFi networks are almost unmanagable and now obsolete.

Again an un-informed and incorrect statement, while the first generation of mesh-boxes (single radios) were basically completely useless the current crop of mesh products such as Strix, Tropos, Telabria etc prove that mesh is very much alive and kicking..

Let me guess, you work for a large telco?

E.

watty

Your own statements in broad terms back my argument.
Today's 108Mbps MIMO or 125Mbps system does give a lot more throughput than 11Mbps a few years ago. It is now quite reasonable for 4 or 5 people on laptops in a house.

But the access protocol is basically the same. the performance drops exponentially as more users are added, unlike token ring type protocols or Radio Routers on "real" mobile outdoor solutions that can allocate a code or time slot (Linear degradation). Wifi, even on Airpoint/Client architecture will degrade badly as users are added. This is called lack of scaleablity.

Yes Mesh is a alive and kicking and I have the insides of two right here. It's advantage is woring with existing WiFi clients. Its disadvantage is that without custome client software there in QOS management and it suffers csame problems of scaling as regular WiFi.

It is not spectrum efficent, nor scalable. Existing licenced solutions and forthcomming Mobile Wimax solve these issues. To pretend that beacause you can have MIMO and 10 times the speed, that the problems go away is not useful.

There is value in Hotspots and Mesh systems. But these serve really specific user and and are not a good general soultion to any member of public.

In some US cities it ends up that the better off at home in their own apartment, who could easily install their own internet hog the lion's share of the bandwidth. Why should these people have free Internet provided for them.

I'm very sceptical of "free Mesh Wifi" being a Yuppie toy, of little use to the ordinary public, visiting business men or tourists.