wifi – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

WiFi sandbox

Via YourTechStuff Here’s a development that seems to hark back to the bad old days worst of the current wi-fi overcharging. The Dublin Dockland Development Authority has been telling the media for the last two years that it would be rolling out “free” wi-fi. Now it has done so — and limited it to 10 … Continue reading “WiFi sandbox”

Via YourTechStuff

Here’s a development that seems to hark back to the bad old days worst of the current wi-fi overcharging. The Dublin Dockland Development Authority has been telling the media for the last two years that it would be rolling out “free” wi-fi. Now it has done so — and limited it to 10 commercial websites.

www.dublindocklands.ie

www.sports.ie

www.welfare.ie

www.met.ie

www.chq.ie

www.ifsc.ie

www.dublinbus.ie

www.itsyourmoney.ie

www.dubsimon.ie

www.phantom.ie

Users accessing websites outside the ten free sites will be charged at rates starting at â‚¬6 for one hour.

This bears a lot of resemblance to my Internet Everywhere model except for two important details.

It’s very expensive – you can buy it by the week for â‚¬60 but that’s horrendously expensive for what will be a grazing service. They can’t expect people to sit on it for hours and even if they did, it shouldn’t be more expensive than sitting at home on your own broadband when you consider the potential contention ratios!
It’s limited to one outbound carrier – I didn’t expect this anyway as it involves a bit more vision. It would also require the buy in of several carriers which would, due to the market, drive prices down. Again, consider the contention here if people actually used it.

The idea of having half a dozen sandboxed commercial sites is enticing anyway. Apart from the fact that free is always good, these companies are advertising, they’re paying for the network. They’ll be visible on the captive portals you use to get out.

Think about it – you need sports results? Or the news? Public transport details? The weather? All of this should be free. And I see no problem with paying for internet access.

Inside your sandbox, you’ll want to host as much content as you can to keep people in the sandbox and only use the wide-area-network provided by the carriers as infrequently as possible. This means perhaps building a series of community forum sites, offering services to the local community so that they come to you first and essentially providing eyeballs for these advertisers.

The cost is where the Dublin Docklands WiFi sandbox most probably fails. They have obviously syndicated content from 10 commercial sites but is that going to be enough when combined with the onerous penalties for daring to look at something off-network!

As a model it’s right on the cusp of being correct as long as they reduce the price and as long as the content from the 10 sites they permit isn’t crap.

BarCamp WiFi Disaster

Okay, this one left me scratching my head. When I arrived at BarCamp, we were allocated two IP addresses on the QUB network and I set about using one of them to provide a public network and the other to provide a Private network for the Webcasts or whatever and to act as a failover. … Continue reading “BarCamp WiFi Disaster”

Okay, this one left me scratching my head.

When I arrived at BarCamp, we were allocated two IP addresses on the QUB network and I set about using one of them to provide a public network and the other to provide a Private network for the Webcasts or whatever and to act as a failover. Things were fine at first until people started to arrive. We might have had ten to fifteen laptops on the network when the WiFi just started playing up.

Using iStumbler, we determined that there was some sort of issue with the network. WiFi channels 1, 6 and 13 were stuffed with ambient traffic so we repositioned to avoid those and still we were getting this problem. In our WiFi network scans we were seeing multiple instances of our networks, though the second one was encrypted. Attempts to join our unencrypted networks would fail silently and the only stable network we could manage was the Ad-hoc one provided by my Macbook Pro – which not everyone could join (the Nokia N800s and Vista laptops mainly).

The theory went:

There was some sort of Trojan effect going on, either automatically or malevolently (and presumably from an attendee). When you put up a network, it would spawn a copy of the network which had a WiFi password. This would cause your attempts to join our network to fail – it was like it was jammed. If you put up an encrypted network, then you had a 50% chance of latching onto the wrong network and entering your WiFi password. This would make WiFi password harvesting to be very quick. They theory continued that the malevolent presence would then join your encrypted network using the harvested password details and start to sniff for passwords on the WiFi.

Bastard, eh?

I would really hate to think this was an attendee acting malevolently but then I’ve seen worse from humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a trojan on someone’s machine because someone definitely had an unpatched Windows machine on the network, the “Free Public Wifi” ad-hoc network that appears nearly everywhere there’s a collection of Windows machines.

See

The puzzling phenomenon of seeing “Free Public Wi-Fi” that you can’t connect to when you’re searching for free public wi-fi has been solved. It’s “Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement.”
From a Nomad Research Centre Advisory:
This advisory documents an anomaly involving Microsoft’s Wireless Network Connection. If a laptop connects to an ad-hoc network it can later start beaconing the ad-hoc network’s SSID as its own ad-hoc network without the laptop owner’s knowledge. This can allow an attacker to attach to the laptop as a prelude to further attack.

Not recent and not unpatched. But there it was.

This post explains something else:

At Emerging Tech 4-5 years ago, someone had set up an ad hoc network with the same name as the real one. It was interfering with the real one, so the organizers repeatedly asked whoever had set up the ad hoc network to shut it down. The culprit turned out to be â€¦. me. But I knew that I had not set up an ad hoc network, much less set one up and name it the same as the conference network. All I did was open my laptop and click on one of the ones that had the official conference name â€¦ which must have been an ad hoc network someone else set up. I then became the â€œcarrier.â€ Ack.

That’s just brilliant. So it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t malevolent and wasn’t a clever Trojan/Worm but rather was just the way Windows works.

If this is the case, an extra special thanks to everyone who uses an unpatched version of Windows. I loved missing talks because I was troubleshooting why the WiFi was screwy.

A Mobile Future

The plea to harness the creativity of the internet and apply it on mobile phones was made by Mitchell Baker the chair of Firefox developer Mozilla. All of this functionality “should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train,” says Ms Baker. – BBC News Surprisingly … Continue reading “A Mobile Future”

The plea to harness the creativity of the internet and apply it on mobile phones was made by Mitchell Baker the chair of Firefox developer Mozilla.

All of this functionality “should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train,” says Ms Baker. – BBC News

Surprisingly this article doesn’t mention the JesusPhone but speaks a lot about the mobile web, location-based services.

This is most telling:

But when can consumers expect results? Not for a while said Mike Butcher from technology blog TechCrunch.

“We are not there yet,” he said. “We are about 18 months from an incredible boom in mobile applications and mobile adoption.”

You heard it there, folks. You have 18 months.

Go.

Internet everywhere…

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert! This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved … Continue reading “Internet everywhere…”

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert!

This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved in – business/ecommerce, playing games, talking/tweeting – the network should support it by:

being present (this is a biggie and probably a first step)
being affordable (it shouldn’t be an arm and a leg more expensive than anything else. I’m looking at you BTOpenZone)
being available (meaning no time restrictions, multiple routes off the network to the internet)

A few years, Andrew Gallagher and I had a meeting or two with other like-minded individuals and started a little offshoot of the Belfast GNU/Linux User Group which Andrew named ‘cumulus wireless’. Some of the guys reported their line-of-sight to others houses but the things that excited me were ‘cantennas’ and setting up a 802.11b wireless signal over a mile down near the Odyssey in Belfast using two iBooks with their airport cards attached to an omni and a backfire antenna.

Again, I can’t speak for Andrew or the rest but my vision was to create a mesh around Belfast which anyone could tap into. This ‘private’ network would be open to use/abuse by anyone and would provide

medium – just simple IP and name resolution and routing, it would be a signal that anyone could join and using zeroconf (or by swapping IP addresses over more conventional means), they could set up any IP connection – be that video, voice, chat, sending files. As long as the data stayed on the network, there would be no charge.
portal – an advertising supported captive portal that would require sign-in every time you wanted to access a service outside the network. This portal would be common and would be there entirely to provide admin contact, acknowledgement of contributors, a small amount of revenue and lastly….
access – I had hoped to convince ISPs locally to sign up to it and provide access to their internet pipes. By getting their access in there, they would pay to support the maintenance and growth of the network. In return, they would charge access to their internet pipe directly to the consumer using credit card, premium SMS, micropayments or whatever they liked. This would mean the market would level itself. If an ISP wanted to offer a basic pipe to keep costs down, then they could. If an ISP wanted to offer a high speed pipe for premium customers who absolutely needed multi-megabyte speeds then, again, they could. It seemed like a pretty good business model.

To put this in perspective, this was in October 2002.

But as things happen, when this was started I was working for Nortel – I’d got the experience in building resilient networks (using wires mostly as Nortel was still mixed about their wireless strategy). Two months later I was an employee of a Mac repair startup which failed spectacularly in May 2003. By June 2003 I was running my own business and didn’t have time for pie in the sky projects like this.

That said, six years later, it’s still not a bad business model.

Today, I read a post from the NotAnMBA blog:

I am writing this post from my laptop, on a bus, in a tunnel.

More specifically, Iâ€™m writing this post from my laptop on BoltBus, a bus service which offers free wi-fi and travels between several of the larger cities in the Northeast, all for about $12 each way, while traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel.

EVDO and similar cell-driven services have been bringing the Internet to unexpected places for a while now, but at a decently-expensive price. Internet on a $12 bus from New York to Philly is another story.

If you can do your job on the Internet, then you can do your job in a lot of places. Now you can do your job on a bus.

and it gets me thinking about what could still be possible with time ( a lot of time ), money (a middling amount of money) and goodwill (a huge amount). Am I a dreamer? Is municipal WiFi still a bit of a pipe dream in the luddite metropolis of Belfast (Yes).

Would I like a WiFi supported bus or train service? I’d definitely skip taking the car if I thought that I could get decent service and a table on the train.

HSDPA coverage in NI

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide. The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The … Continue reading “HSDPA coverage in NI”

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide.

The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The current EDGE-based iPhone can do one or the other; that is you can’t start browsing the web on your phone while you’re using it for a telephone call. Yes, this is a real need!

What does this mean for speeds? Rumour has it that O2’s implementation has a theoretical peak of 3.6 Mbps (about 400 kilobytes per second) but their mobilebroadband USB modem package, which also uses HSDPA, tops out at 1.8 Mbps. That’s not quite as impressive but then again, beats the pants off EDGE. O2 also specifically prohibit streaming and VoIP applications over their 3G network.

O2’s roaming charges for data aren’t too bad these days. For countries in Europe it’s Â£3 per megabyte and outside of that, Â£6 per megabyte. Considering that since October 2007 I’ve consumed less than 1 gigabyte of data, I’m not worried about the additional charges for roaming while I’m on holiday for two weeks in August.

I’m going to pop into an O2 store later this week – have a go at their 3G demo machine and ask some questions. Last time I tried a 3G demo machine was in the Three (3) shop in Castlecourt and my iPhone beat Windows on 3G for rendering a web site – so you can imagine how slow the 3G was. Not very impressive. Now…O2’s infrastructure provides Three (3)’s 2G network and a little birdie told me that Orange provide the backbone for their 3G network so the 3G performance I noted may not be indicative.

If you’re in Belfast, say, around QUB, you’re going to do okay.

but coverage gets very patchy outside of the town centre in Bangor (where I live). In fact, my house is right in the middle of one of the big white areas there so I’m going to have to rely on WiFi or (god forbid) dialling down to EDGE or GPRS.

and where my parents live in Lisburn is just … barren. For what it’s worth, they live about 200 metres away from that green B101 label in the centre of the map. It doesn’t look like they’re going to be enjoying HSDPA speeds any time soon!

and I’m thankful that Mac-Sys Ltd will give you their WiFi password if you ask them nicely because coverage in Newtownabbey really depends. As soon as you start seeing grass, the coverage simply ends.

The saving grace is that O2’s mobile broadband contract also covers the Cloud hotspots (which there are quite a few of these days) and the iPhone contract will also cover BT OpenZone hotspots from July 11th (give or take a few days). Pretty soon, we’ll have wireless everywhere.

So, go on, pop along to O2’s network maps for HSDPA and post your area coverage. Drop me a link or a pingback so we can see what’s happening!

Muni-WiFi revisited

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi: The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both. The lack of understanding of … Continue reading “Muni-WiFi revisited”

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi:

The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both.
The lack of understanding of the technology quite often lead to the network either using not enough wireless nodes resulting in bad coverage, low throughput, high latency and other performance problems or to too many wireless nodes causing signal interference, “node hopping” etc. also resulting on performance problems. All this results in a dissatisfied user which in turn leads to bad publicity, falling revenue and investors losing confidence.
Lousy business models more often than not contained unrealistic user numbers and inflated revenue forecasts. Combine the two and you have a recipe for disaster.

Absolutely.

I’m enchanted by the idea of muni-wifi even to the point that I almost bought fifty (50, countem) mesh nodes from Meraki for deployment around Belfast.

This hardware was to be funded out of my own pocket.
There were going to be 3-4 network uplinks funded too, out of my own pocket – yes, using cheap-ass broadband links.
This was to cover the city centre as best I could, providing free (sign-up based) access to t’internet.
This was to invite others to assist by providing backup links, sharing bandwidth.
I hoped to entice additional mesh links via Belfast City Council.

I approached Belfast City Council and was told there was no need for something like this because BT was already providing BT OpenZone for Â£6 an hour. Seriously.

My desire for this was based on the number of times I wanted faster access to the Internet when I was in town. At the time I only had my Newt (with WiFi), my laptop (with WiFi), my Nokia N800 (with WiFi) or my iPod touch. I see less of a need for it these days because of my iPhone and the unlimited data plan but speedier access is still welcome. Because of unlimited data plans along with telephone calls and texts, the cost of data has reduced to effectively zero. This is going to make it hard in the future to justify any charge-based networks in the future. I certainly never join BTOpenZone networks these days.

While I love the idea of it, I have no confidence in the ability of councils to deliver. It’ll have to be private companies and then how are they to make money.

Municipal WiFi failing again. Try FON.

I got this Businessweek link from DaringFireball this morning. “A few weeks after announcing it will shut down its municipal wireless network in New Orleans, EarthLink Inc. said Tuesday that it has notified its Wi-Fi customers in Philadelphia that it is terminating that network, too.” This is what happens when ideas are put out there … Continue reading “Municipal WiFi failing again. Try FON.”

I got this Businessweek link from DaringFireball this morning.

“A few weeks after announcing it will shut down its municipal wireless network in New Orleans, EarthLink Inc. said Tuesday that it has notified its Wi-Fi customers in Philadelphia that it is terminating that network, too.”

This is what happens when ideas are put out there without a plan.

I’m putting my faith in FON.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get free/cheap Internet access for my iPhone when I’m travelling around the Baltic capitals in August and with BT’s data roaming charges of Â£7.50 a megabyte (about $15 – which is 1.5 cents per kilobyte), there has to be another way.

Have FON, will Travel

Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki are covered in FON points. St Petersburg, Talinn and Warnemunde much less so. MUCH less so. A bit like Belfast, Bangor and everywhere else in Northern Ireland. But the potential to be able to access WiFi points while travelling is simply too strong.

I’ve never seen a FON WiFi signal when I’ve been out and about so I reckon I should be a bit pro-active and do something about that considering that there seems to be no-one else working on it for Belfast and I don’t have the time!

So, this morning I bought two FON routers and I’m putting one in the house. Not sure where the second should go.

Wireless on the Choo-choo?

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”? …getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has … Continue reading “Wireless on the Choo-choo?”

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”?

…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.

Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.

Why?

Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.

IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!

The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.

Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?

Bedou-working…

The Economist on Techno-Bedouin. “The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both … Continue reading “Bedou-working…”

The Economist on Techno-Bedouin.

“The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.”

“Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops.”

This is parallel to the Co-Working strategy that David and Andy have been working on.

It’s a tall order to fill a co-working space. Even at an offer acceptance of Â£10 000 per annum, that still means the costs will likely be Â£18 000 per year (when you add Â£6800+ in rates and minimal electricity) not including broadband and heating – that’s Â£1500 a month! To bring the costs to a manageable level that people might want to pay, you’re going to have to aim for occupancy of around 15+. You could do it with less people (paying more) but you’re then really buying into the idea that people will pay for a co-working environment.

I’ve already said that Mac-Sys will put money down to secure a space (which will likely be used once in a blue moon) and we’ll also supply some of the infrastructure as well, if required. I hope it works out – I’m a little jealous of the guys involved as my dance card is totally filled at the moment (with work, babysitting, writing the new book, spending time with her indoors and trying to actually live life!).

I still have my own dreams regarding a Co-Work space that will likely never be realised due to the costs and time it would take to set up (and the fact it’s not an affair for an attic). My theory is that a co-work space needs to have it’s own identity and, if necessary, it’s own employees. Someone needs to be responsible for cleaning the loos, someone needs to keep the place running, chase up the co-conspirators for rent money – and just like in a shared house, that can be incredibly wearing on the patience. Hence you hire someone to do it.

This is why my idea for it was based around the coffee shop. The idea being to straddle the space between public coffee shop and serviced office. I was never 100% sure if Belfast was the right place for it but I still would like to give it a go.

It needs more than just an office though. It needs to be a network.

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