Free wifi in Dublin City: when?

Gumbo

has anybody got it working yet?
You have to register on www.gowex.xom or through the iPhone/Android App.

miamee

SunnyDub1 wrote: »

quote from article



Defo a money making business IMO

FYP!

What's wrong with charging for higher speeds? What are you likely to be using it for while walking round the city anyway? A bit of boards or twitter or facebook, checking a Google Map for something, looking up a cinema time. No need for higher speeds for 'normal usage' I reckon.

miamee

There are 14 different icons including the pyjama girl one.

Dublin’s newest tribe, girls in pyjama bottoms were first spotted in the early 2000’s. At first believed to be a mythical creature, the Pyjama girl has since become a Dublin institution. Accessorising with big earrings, big furry boots and bags of attitude, they travel in packs of three or more, in the direction of the nearest 24-hour shop.

Mr Simpson

Wifi Threads Merged

riclad

MCDONALDS has free wifi, all librarys have free wifi,i notice if i stand outside most phone shop, i get an open wifi network.Many buses have free wifi.IF you are a tourist you can probably afford 1 euro for 60 minutes net acess in a netcafe.
I,D be more concerned about gangs of junkies hanging around the city centre ,temple bar.Not exactly good for attracting tourists to ireland.

Amirani

riclad wrote: »

MCDONALDS has free wifi, all librarys have free wifi,i notice if i stand outside most phone shop, i get an open wifi network.Many buses have free wifi.IF you are a tourist you can probably afford 1 euro for 60 minutes net acess in a netcafe.
I,D be more concerned about gangs of junkies hanging around the city centre ,temple bar.Not exactly good for attracting tourists to ireland.

Gangs of junkies on the wifi? :pac:

spurious

NiallSparky wrote: »

Gangs of junkies on the wifi? :pac:

On the wi-phy.

John_Rambo

spurious wrote: »

On the wi-phy.

Ha!

antodeco

Im in Thailand and there's free wifi nearly everywhere. There's a time limit on per 24 hours. It's great for checking the meanings of a menu, or looking up local places. I've a lot of offline maps downloaded but, for example, I was looking for a sports bar and googled away. It made me spend more in different places.

John_Rambo

D1stant wrote: »

Jaysus. Who's bright idea was that?


What next? fat bankers, grinning poiticians, shuffling junkies

Or Dublin bikes, plastic bag levy, no smoking in pubs and restaurants??

Embrace the future, embrace change my friend.

schrodinger

Myself and a friend tested out the wireless at the weekend... suffice it to say the experience was less than enjoyable.

As expected it's a register for service which will give you a restricted speed - or pay for the premium service.... [RANT REMOVED]

We tested St. Patrick's Park first and while the signal seemed OK we could barely load the main Gowex registration page or ping the default gateway assigned from the network - when it actually bothered to gives us an IP address. This was sitting out in the open, no physical obstructions and using a 500mW USB wireless adapter and combinations of 7db directional panel antenna and a 9db omnidirectional antenna.

After freezing for a little while more and suffering head aches from listening to the St. Patrick's church bells for far too long we moved on to use another location.

Off we popped down to Barnardo's Square and found the wireless there to at least load the main page, slowly, on an Android phone. So where's the best and most comfortable place to proceed with trying out the service ? That's right, the pub across the road. Brogans bar is right across the street from Barnardo's Square. We sat in the front of the pub at the main window and tried the service. The signal was dreadful...... I did however get onto the registration page. Huzzah!

https://wisp.gowex.com/profile/registro.do

So the registration requires your mobile phone number.... [RANT REMOVED] This is to send you your generated password.......... which will also be emailed to you...... I'd personally prefer to think up my own and not provide these people with my mobile phone number for a free public service. Anyway, on with the registration. Having some reservations about the process, I had been sitting there at the registration page for about 15 minutes or more thinking about what to do. Continuing on down the page I clicked the "Privacy Policy" - "PAGE CANNOT BE LOAD - TIMEOUT" I had been disconnected from the wireless service.

I was running a Linux laptop and when I'm testing wireless service I like to avail of the output of "iw event" which was telling me that I had been disconnected from the service for inactivity .... I then spent another 10-20 minutes attempting to connect back to the service to only be turfed out each time. After some more exercises in technical futility I got associated again but I wasn't being provided an IP address from the service.

Time to finish our pints and leave!

For the more technically minded here's a quick summary :

• General association problems
• No ARP from the default gateway
• Huge ICMP packet loss when an ARP was eventually received
• Weak signal strength when your not literally in the location tagged on the map
• Disassociation for inactivity
• DHCP issues
• Had to change MAC address to get reconnected
• Privacy concerns

I think it was crazy that both my friend and I had issues with our business grade laptop hardware and had to resort to whipping out external wireless cards and antennae. Hell when I bought my laptop I had the internal wireless antenna upgraded and it still wasn't enough to use the Dublin Free Wifi. I've seen community run wireless done better than this..... I hope the service improves over time but I don't think I will ever register for it since these people don't need my phone number, my preference I know a lot of people don't care.

ScottSF

Thanks for the detailed and technical report Schrodinger!

I'm curious if the service accepts a mobile number from the U.S. or Canada to get the registration password. So many tourists come from America and the WiFi is designed for the tourist market from what I read.

I would think that many people from the states are using their mobile phones for emergencies only and to get email and basic internet access. A text message is not free when roaming on a U.S. mobile plan.

Also many tourists have an iPad or android or kindle tablet with WiFi only and no 3G or mobile capability.

IMHO the free WiFi has to come with as few hassles as possible. We don't want tourists wasting time and getting frustrated trying to get on the WiFi while on vacation.

They most simple solution may be the low tech one. Give out scratch cards with a WiFi password good for 1 free hour with the option to purchase a 1 day pass (only when coverage is more city-wide). It also gives visitors a reason to go into a local shop or cafe to ask for one.

Gumbo

Great post^^^^^^^^

I would email Gowex and Dublin City Council to make them aware of it.

I registered the other day on Dame street and changed my password to a more personal one once logged in.

I also deleted the app as it was dragging on my location services for hours after use, so i mailed the developers and left feedback on the iTunes store.

schrodinger

ScottSF wrote: »

[...]

I'm curious if the service accepts a mobile number from the U.S. or Canada to get the registration password. So many tourists come from America and the WiFi is designed for the tourist market from what I read.

I would think that many people from the states are using their mobile phones for emergencies only and to get email and basic internet access. A text message is not free when roaming on a U.S. mobile plan.

Also many tourists have an iPad or android or kindle tablet with WiFi only and no 3G or mobile capability.

[...]

Excellent points, never considered actual visitors/tourist use, got too irritated after my initial dealings to think of further affected users. I'd agree that it's going to annoy them more than anything.

Cienciano

schrodinger wrote: »

Myself and a friend tested out the wireless at the weekend... suffice it to say the experience was less than enjoyable.....

I wonder if it's going to be improved? I notice a fair few places have wi-fi, but it's terrible. They just have it so they can say they have it. In any dublin pub that has it I always find myself using my normal O2 3g data connection because the wifi is so painfully slow.

schrodinger

Cienciano wrote: »

I wonder if it's going to be improved? I notice a fair few places have wi-fi, but it's terrible. They just have it so they can say they have it. In any dublin pub that has it I always find myself using my normal O2 3g data connection because the wifi is so painfully slow.

It really does depend.... I used to think Bitbuzz was a dreadful service and then the quality really did improve. I just won't pay for it But in the places where they have 15 minute Bitbuzz freebies I use it and it works very well for what it is - even if they do block most things other than HTTP and HTTPS which is irritating but doesn't affect me. But yes, most of the time though I would do the same, screw the free wireless - I'll tether to my phone - that's also a separate rant since Meteor "mess" with my data

For anyone curious to know what that means I discovered that I cannot perform SMTP over TLS because Meteor are stripping the STARTTLS offer from my private server........... [EXPLETIVES REMOVED] but suffice it to say I am appalled that Meteor won't allow me to communicate securely with my mail server. It's not like I am sending private information or passwords over the Internet .... oh wait.....

I'm digressing, apologies.

cros13

schrodinger wrote: »

It really does depend.... I used to think Bitbuzz was a dreadful service and then the quality really did improve. I just won't pay for it But in the places where they have 15 minute Bitbuzz freebies I use it and it works very well for what it is - even if they do block most things other than HTTP and HTTPS which is irritating but doesn't affect me. But yes, most of the time though I would do the same, screw the free wireless - I'll tether to my phone - that's also a separate rant since Meteor "mess" with my data

For anyone curious to know what that means I discovered that I cannot perform SMTP over TLS because Meteor are stripping the STARTTLS offer from my private server........... [EXPLETIVES REMOVED] but suffice it to say I am appalled that Meteor won't allow me to communicate securely with my mail server. It's not like I am sending private information or passwords over the Internet .... oh wait.....

I'm digressing, apologies.

I have general issues with anything that f*cks about with my traffic.

I also can't understand how any of these captive portal based muppets can't just:

• properly plan their AP locations using real wifi planning tools
• do registration for premium users on their website
• bandwidth limit every user on the open SSID
• use RADIUS authentication on a separate WPA2-Enterprise SSID for the faster, more secure premium service
• use 5ghz in the heavy RF of a city center
• use f*cking controllers

I had a look at gomex's android app... it's starting on boot, running in the background constantly, and making lots of little baby wakelocks in an attempt to murder my battery.

Gumbo

cros13 wrote: »

I have general issues with anything that f*cks about with my traffic.

I also can't understand how any of these captive portal based muppets can't just:

• properly plan their AP locations using real wifi planning tools
• do registration for premium users on their website
• bandwidth limit every user on the open SSID
• use RADIUS authentication on a separate WPA2-Enterprise SSID for the faster, more secure premium service
• use 5ghz in the heavy RF of a city center
• use f*cking controllers

I had a look at gomex's android app... it's starting on boot, running in the background constantly, and making lots of little baby wakelocks in an attempt to murder my battery.

Exactly why I deleted the iPhone app too.

schrodinger

cros13 wrote: »

I have general issues with anything that f*cks about with my traffic.

I also can't understand how any of these captive portal based muppets can't just:

• properly plan their AP locations using real wifi planning tools
• do registration for premium users on their website
• bandwidth limit every user on the open SSID
• use RADIUS authentication on a separate WPA2-Enterprise SSID for the faster, more secure premium service
• use 5ghz in the heavy RF of a city center
• use f*cking controllers

I had a look at gomex's android app... it's starting on boot, running in the background constantly, and making lots of little baby wakelocks in an attempt to murder my battery.

Hahaha. I don't have a lot of experience with many wireless controllers but they tend to be expensive and a single point of failure. From what we could tell the hotspot in St. Patrick's Park was just a single AP and in Barnardos square it was at least two access points, not a setup that would warrant a wireless controller. They were using Routerboard hardware, I'm not sure how good they are.

cros13

schrodinger wrote: »

Hahaha. I don't have a lot of experience with many wireless controllers but they tend to be expensive and a single point of failure. From what we could tell the hotspot in St. Patrick's Park was just a single AP and in Barnardos square it was at least two access points, not a setup that would warrant a wireless controller. They were using Routerboard hardware, I'm not sure how good they are.

I've always found controller based wireless networks to be much more stable. Plus you get the benefits of easier roaming as you move from AP to AP, load balancing across APs and spectrum. You also get interference, power output and spectrum management.

I consider any captive portal at least on WiFi to be a design fault TBH. One of primary reasons is it requires a huge amount of user-interaction which immediately cuts down on the networks' usefulness. The replacement on mobile devices is often a badly designed app that has to keep a watch for when you are in range of one of it's anointed SSIDs.

Don't even get me started on the mandatory user registration step GOMEX adds that took enough of my time that I'm considering billing them.