US Airways Sees Low Internet Usage

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Towerstream's Plan for Manhattan-Fi

The wireless backbone provider Towerstream will flip on a dense Manhattan Wi-Fi network: Towerstream built a wireless network in the skyline, paying for prime locations on the top of buildings to point high-speed service at line-of-sight locations where conventional wired or even fiber broadband wasn't available, would take too long, or wasn't competitive or reliable enough. Now it's taking aim at Wi-Fi. But it's not trying to be a metro-scale Wi-Fi operator. That would be foolish. Rather, Towerstream is building out a dense Wi-Fi zone, described by BusinessWeek as seven square miles of Manhattan. The firm is deploying 1,000 routers, and the backhaul is clearly its own building-top network. Being able to leverage its own backhaul is a distinct financial advantage, as it already has a business model that works for the point-to-multi-point service it offers today. This is icing on the cake. Towerstream will sell access to the network to carriers looking to offload mobile 3G and 4G traffic from congested, expensive cellular networks to Wi-Fi. AT&T has built similar zones itself, although I doubt quite as dense or extensive. Towerstream could become a vendor-neutral cost-effective alternative to carriers building these "heat sinks" for high bandwidth usage themselves. Phone users benefit from this offloading as well as carriers. You get a much faster rate of service from a dense, high-speed Wi-Fi network than the comparable 3G or even 4G service, and no carrier in the US bills by the byte for Wi-Fi: if it's included, it's free. Thus, you can use much more data without hitting limits or paying overages. The BusinessWeek article has a serious flaw, however. It misstates the nature and reason for failure of municipally backed Wi-Fi networks. The writer, Peter Burrows, makes a variety of historical errors, including stating, "While most of the failed experiments of yore were based on taxpayer-funded municipal projects, this time there's a clear business need for wireless carriers." In fact, there wound up being built no taxpayer-funded municipal networks. All of the deals involved cities or counties bidding out the right to build a network, with access to public facilities (conduits, towers, building tops, etc.) as part of the carrot. Very little municipal money was spent, while private firms went through tens of millions in never-completed network buildouts. Minneapolis stands as a shining example of the only network that was completed and thrived. (The city purchases services from the network operator, but the network was funded and is run by US Internet.) Burrows also describes the router that Towerstream will use somewhat incompletely. He talks about it being an antenna, for starters, and claiming the units run $800 each. That might be the unit cost, but installation and providing an electrical feed will run the installed price much higher. He notes, though, that Towerstream will pay $50 to $1,000 per month to the owner of the property at which a router is installed. Nice fees if you can get them. There's a great capper to this story: Towerstream's quiet 3-month test of 200 routers in Manhattan: "Last year, Towerstream conducted a three-month test of a 200-device Wi-Fi network in Manhattan. Without any promotion, the network handled 20 million Web sessions by consumers who happened to spot Towerstream when trolling for a Wi-Fi connection." That's the kind of data that might get carriers to sign up.

T-Mobile Adds Free Wi-Fi Calling

After a few years, however, even after making the add-on price as low as $10/mo for a family plan for unlimited calls that started on Wi-Fi (either placed or received on a Wi-Fi network at home or a hotspot), T-Mobile stopped offering the service to new customers. Apparently, it continued to be available as a calling option, with Wi-Fi calls being deducted from general minute pools.

Metro-North Has Secret Wi-Fi Train

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Alaska Airlines Completes Wi-Fi Install

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Free Wi-Fi in New York's DUMBO Neighborhood

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Tempe Wins Suit over Wi-Fi Hardware

Ah, this brings back memories: Cast your mind way way back to 2006, when Tempe, Ariz., was on the cutting edge of municipal wireless systems. The city, which already had its own wireless ring for city backhaul, put out a tender for a firm to provide a combination of public and private services. Neoreach won the bid, and built some of the network out as it shifted through names and subsidiaries, winding up with Gobility as the ultimate owner when the network failed. (Gobility had oceans of issues unrelated to this network.) While the network hasn't been operational even in part since 2007, the gear was left all over town. Two-thirds of the access points were owned by a leasing firm, Commonwealth Capital Corporation (CCC). If the nodes were abandoned, Tempe alleged, then Tempe would be granted ownership. CCC disagreed, because it hoped to sell the system with the nodes still in place. CCC sued to have the nodes returned to it after ridiculous attempts were made by it to sell the network. The case ran from Feb. 2009 to March 2011, when the company dismissed its own lawsuit. Tempe, meanwhile, had sued CCC for the rent due on pole usage for the period when CCC was trying to sell the gear. Tempe prevailed in court for $1.8m and ownership of the hardware. The money assuages the fact that the 4-5-year-old hardware is likely nearly unusable. It should be mostly Strix Systems gear, which appears to still be a going concern, even though its "news spotlight" page refers only to events in 2007. There's likely some backhaul equipment from other makers. This is the last gear hanging that I'm aware of from the olden days of 2006-2008 that isn't in active use, such as the network in Minneapolis.

Taco Bell Refries Wi-FI

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Boingo Adds Gogo Support

The Gogo connection lets you use the same Boingo software, account, and linked credit card to pay for in-flight Internet access at the same retail rate as other passengers. One would hope Boingo could negotiate a better rate by reducing Gogo's marketing burden to bring customers in the future.

False Kid Porno Raid Gets Media Play

A Buffalo, NY, man gets an early morning visit (and alleged contusions) from the ICE: His left his Wi-Fi network open, and extremely poor FBI work (according to this AP report) led to a raid on his home because that's where the IP address led. While it's no crime in the US—it is in some other countries—to leave your network open for anyone to access, this isn't the first time this has happened. I've written up a few previous similar incidents that led to police or federal agents breaking down the doors for criminal acts conducted over the network at the physical address. In most cases, a neighbor is the guilty party. You'd think the FBI would be briefing agents on this issue, so that they don't face multi-million-dollar lawsuits for faulty work that pinpoints the wrong person. The Buffalo man isn't suing, even though his attorney alleges he was thrown down the stairs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He says they didn't properly identify who they were after breaking down the door and brandishing weapons. (Who knows from ICE?) Even on an open network, it's possible to track identifiers that would allow relatively easy confirmation of which machine was the case, or to stake out the area for a few nights, tracking signals and locations. Then agents could enlist the homeowner with the open network to ensure the Wi-Fi signal remained available and could be used to track at which exact moment that a perpetrator was engaged in an illegal act and then raided at the same time. (We're talking child pornography here, not file swapping.) The AP article says that US-CERT recommends "closing" a Wi-Fi network among other security measures. This option, labeled differently on each maker's router software, disables default beaconing, and thus the network name and availability isn't broadcast. However, whenever the network is use by a party that knows the name and has associated with it (encryption or otherwise), traffic can be snooped and connection information extracted. I don't recommend closing a network as it provides no effective security, and neither does limiting an network to specific MAC addresses (the Wi-Fi adapter's unique hardware number). US-CERT has six recommendations for best home practices on its Securing Wireless Networks page , which include these two. Closing a network is noted as "Protect Your SSID." Really, using a nine-letter/digit WPA password is the simplest way to protect a network in a reliable and secure way no matter what other restrictions are in place. I choose to password protect my network in part because I don't want to be indirectly responsible for anyone's actions on my network (whether in a raid or just because someone commits a nefarious act using my router), and because Comcast caps my use at 250 GB per month.

American Airlines Trials In-Plane Streaming

Finally: I've been asking the question for several years: when will media servers on planes be used to provide in-flight entertainment over Wi-Fi? The answer is now. Aircell told me years ago that they had provisioned the ability to put media servers on planes, and were waiting for pieces to fall into place. Its public trial with American Airlines on a couple of 767-200s will start this summer. It's a logical connection that when you have people on a local, high-speed wireless network that you could deliver content to them for free and for a fee. Given that the majority (sometimes entirety) of people on a flight have some kind of device with a screen, why build in miles of wire and clunky seatback entertainment systems? One of the best, Virgin American's Red, is still slow, hard to navigate, and of poor quality relative to even the worst tablet or netbook. Alaska Airlines never installed such systems for reasons of cost, and rents its digEplayer instead—a portable tablet preloaded and precharged. An airline that moves away from seatback systems and into passenger-provided hardware could also stock tablets for rental, now that there will be ready availability of a variety of sizes and capabilities that handle video playback well, and which cost relatively little compared to custom systems like the digEplayer. This could also eliminate live satellite feeds by providing time-delayed playback on demand. Imagine that when a plane comes to a halt and the doors are opened that a system at each gate starts a high-speed 802.11n transfer of several hours of news and other recent sports, talk shows, and network programs. There's something nice about "live," but there's also the reality of operational cost and antenna drag. Aircell and American haven't announced which programs and movies will be available nor the cost or other particulars.

Ten Years Old Today

Wi-Fi Networking News celebrates its tenth anniversary: Thank you all for sticking with me all of these years! There's less news that relevant as Wi-Fi hit the mainstream, routers are simpler to configure, and the industry matured. I'll keep reporting for as long as there are topics of interest—and you all are still reading.

Eye-Fi's Direct Mode Turns Card into Hotspot for Mobile Transfers

A new mode in Eye-Fi X2 cards let you rely images through a smartphone using a neat trick: I'm a long-time fan of the Eye-Fi digital camera cards that pack a CPU, a Wi-Fi radio, and now up to 8 GB of storage into an SD or SDHC form factor. The Eye-Fi line is regularly updated to add features like transfer of RAW images or video files, or endless storage, in which images already wirelessly transferred to another location can be deleted when storage is needed. (I haven't erased my Eye-Fi camera card since that feature came out. I simply don't need to know what's on the card any more.) Direct Mode is another in that array of improvements, and it requires a little explanation. Eye-Fi may be a bit breezy in describing the feature, which requires you to think a bit differently about how the card works. In regular operation, an Eye-Fi card looks to a camera precisely like any memory card. Whenever the Eye-Fi recognizes a Wi-Fi network it knows about, it connects, and starts to carry out whatever operations were waiting for access, such as uploading files to a computer or sharing service. This works whether the network in question is a home network for which you've stored a password, a public network to which you have access through an Eye-Fi subscription, or a free network tied in via Eye-Fi's relationship with Devicescape's Easy WiFi service. But in Direct Mode, the card will transform from a Wi-Fi client into a Wi-Fi hotspot, but not for just any device to connect. Rather, if you have a smartphone or tablet with the Eye-Fi software running (available for iOS and Android initially), the app connects to the card over Wi-Fi, and images are transferred over. You can use a 3G-equipped device to relay and upload images and movies, or transfer media and then connect via Wi-Fi to a network to upload that data from the app. The mobile app can copy media over the Internet to whatever computer with which you paired the Eye-Fi—the one to which over a local network the card sends files—as well as an online sharing or social-networking site you've picked from Eye-Fi's partners. Direct Mode was announced with more details alongside the release of the Mobile X2 , part of a reshuffling of the Eye-Fi line up, which now comprises Connect X2, Mobile X2, and Pro X2. The Connect has 4 GB and costs $50, while the Mobile has 8 GB and costs $80. That's their only difference. The Pro at $150 and with 8 GB of storage adds RAW file handling, and including a geotagging and a 1-year hotspot subscription. While RAW is restricted to the Pro model, you can add geotagging to Connect or Mobile for $30 (one-time fee), and hotspot access for $30/yr. Direct Mode will be a firmware upgrade for all current and past X2 models in a few weeks, according to Eye-Fi.

AT&T Gives Free Wi-Fi to 20 New York Parks

Wonderful question Dana. When I worked with Wireless Harlem from 2006-2008 we approched DoITT about providing free wireless in Central Harlem and the park closet to 125th Street, Marcus Garvey Park, that serves an extremly diverse community; there was so many telco and Cablevision that supposedly had agreements to bid for the opportunity to provide free wireless to that underserved community and 4 years later what progress has been made. Someone should look into how DoITT awarded AT&T the deal. But then who really looks into city fraud these days..wait..any DoITT employees want to send a "confidential" letter to NYCity Controller John Liu?

Cablevision Bumps Wi-Fi Speed Significantly

The company tells me it has 10,000s of access points in place across its New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut markets, along with 7,000 hotspots in business locations that are Cablevision customers. Over 500,000 Cablevision customers have used the network so far.