ANARCHY!
ANARCHY!
Yes! I am now officially never using a wireless hotspot again. Not unless I have a stupidly crazy business critical need to do so.
I am sat in the M&S Moto service station outside Reading (that’s pronounced “Redding” for our international users, not ‘Reading’ as in “I’m reading a book”). I am waiting for the ridiculous traffic on the M4 motorway to subside so I popped in here after leaving Vodafone to check email and fuel up.
Obviously I was planning on using a wireless hotspot. I took one look at the uninspiring Moto wireless offer (five quid for an hour) and the T-Mobile one and thought, “No.”
No. That’s it. No need. We move on. What IS the point of paying twenty quid a month or crazy prices per hour when you can get a 3 USB mobile broadband stick for a tenner a month? Or a Vodafone one for 15 quid a month?
The fact that these services now actually work reliably should most definitely encourage providers of wifi hotspots to seriously evaluate their business models. I most certainly am not smiling politely at the owners of this Moto service station for flogging WiFi at me and I won’t be going out of my way to drop off at any of their other properties unless I absolutely need to as a result.
There’s definitely still a market for professionally managed services — I’m thinking iPass or Boingo — and I am still holding on to my The Cloud hotspot service for the time being. But now, when I’m UK-based, I will most definitely be using mobile broadband.
Why pay for WiFi? Share your WiFi and use other people's for free. Get a FON!
http://www.fon.com/en – go on, they're only
I've got one… but I have not once seen another FON that I could use?
I have the VF dongle and can vouch for this – I'm not entirely sure how I lived without it…
..actually – that's a lie. I used to use my phone as a modem. At least this way things are easier.
Worst of all are hotels that still charge for wireless internet – it's like charging for the bath water. Wireless internet for a medium sized hotel probably costs a couple of hundred quid to set up and
As well as dongles, many laptops now come with built in HSDPA cards. Of course, it does mean that when 4G comes along you'll either need to get a new laptop or an external dongle.
I use a Dell D430 and the performance from the internal card is great. Only possible downside is that you need to remove the laptop's battery before you can change the SIM card.
On one side, 3G is not working as well as it should – try using it indoors, or in crowded areas. HSDPA delivers a -maximum- 3.6Mbps split among all the users of a cell, so you're only going to get a small piece of that if many people start using it. Besides, latency makes it almost unusable for various things such as VoIP.
Now the shameless plug (I'm the CTO): You can use Whisher to share your WiFi without having to pay
I came to near enough the same conclusion at the end of March: http://freshplastic.vox.com/library/post/nightm…
WiFi hotspots are a mess. Sure it's nice when you get faster than 3.5G speeds and don't have to worry about a fair use limit, but the whole (often unsuccessful) process involved isn't worth it when it's free and certainly isn't when you have to pay!
Mike, this looks really cool but I'd love to be able to read some technical detail on how the WiFi sharing works to satisfy myself about the security / suitability of the solution for me. Couldn't find any of that detail on the site…?
Ben,
We don't have any information yet as we are trying to keep things simple for the majority of people, but I'm working on a technical section for those interested in knowing what goes on under the hood. The gist of it is that we are transparently and securely sharing the encryption keys of the shared WiFi signals. When you share your WiFi, we redistribute your encryption key to the other Whisher clients, which in turn store it encrypted for use when needed. Thus, the client applies the key, and your visitors never even see it.
If you want to temporarily stop sharing (for example you want all your bandwidth to download a heavy file) you can enable private mode either from the plugin, or from the My Account section on our website. This will kick out all the visitors that may currently be connected. In previous versions we had a third mode which was 'Buddies only', in which you decided with whom you shared your WiFi in a buddy-list style, and we will bring this back once we are confident users understand how the system works.
Mike,
Thanks for that – even something at that level would be useful to understand on the site.
Does the client take any steps to control visitors to a network (access to other hosts on the network / bandwidth throttling / content filtering / logging etc) or is it pure key-sharing?
Ben
Ben,
We don't have any information yet as we are trying to keep things simple for the majority of people, but I'm working on a technical section for those interested in knowing what goes on under the hood. The gist of it is that we are transparently and securely sharing the encryption keys of the shared WiFi signals. When you share your WiFi, we redistribute your encryption key to the other Whisher clients, which in turn store it encrypted for use when needed. Thus, the client applies the key, and your visitors never even see it.
If you want to temporarily stop sharing (for example you want all your bandwidth to download a heavy file) you can enable private mode either from the plugin, or from the My Account section on our website. This will kick out all the visitors that may currently be connected. In previous versions we had a third mode which was 'Buddies only', in which you decided with whom you shared your WiFi in a buddy-list style, and we will bring this back once we are confident users understand how the system works.
Mike,
Thanks for that – even something at that level would be useful to understand on the site.
Does the client take any steps to control visitors to a network (access to other hosts on the network / bandwidth throttling / content filtering / logging etc) or is it pure key-sharing?
Ben