Starbucks Clashes With WiFi Hobbyists Over Airwaves

fobbman writes: "Portland Oregon's Pioneer Square (the heart of downtown) has had free WiFi access provided since February by Personal Telco, which is a local group of computer hobbyists. Now Starbuck's is planning on offering the same service on the same band in the same area for $29.95 a month, according to this story in the local fishwrap. Without regulation or licensing, and with WiFi growing, this could become a common problem."

Comments

More links

[countach]

Here is a link about using wireless mobile at Starbucks. Here is a Wall Street article about it, and a brief intro. Here's an article praising the idea.

Re:Legitimate concern or disguised marketing?

[Omega Hacker]

No, this is a legitimate story. I'm a PTP member fairly involved in quite a number of projects (though I wasn't involved in this particular node), and here's what I know:

The T-mobile installers talked to several PTP members in Starbucks as they were installing the hardware. They were made aware of the PTP node, and which channel it was on, as well as how long it had been installed (since February 2001).

T-mobile uses channel 1 on all their sites, so this is actually not an intentional act on their part, but either laziness or "corporate policy".

Channel 1 is used by these companies because software searches for an AP from channel 1 upwards. Obviously, they want to be found first.

A TV news spot (link can probably be found on the PTP site soon, I captured/encoded it and let others mirror on faster machines) was also shot today at the square, with a half-dozen PTP members sitting there trying to surf. The clip shows the tmobile and www.personaltelco.net AP's flashing in and out, as they stomped on each other. Performance of both network (we presume, no one has wasted $30/mo on a T-mobile account) sucked badly.

And for the curious, the Pioneer Courthouse Square Starbucks node is fed by a *satellite* connection, meaning horrendous latencies. The PersonalTelco node at the same location is fed by dual T1's. Do the math on bandwidth and latency, and tell me if you want to spend $30/mo for T-mobile....

802.11b supports overlapping networks

[Adam J. Richter]

802.11b supports independent physically overlapping networks. Each network has a name (an "essid"). For example, if you had a network name "starbucks" and another named "free", and were using GNU/Linux, you could do:

iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed essid starbucks
udhcpc --interface wlan0
or
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed essid free
udhcpc --interface wlan0

For more efficient transmission, you can even program your access points to use different frequencies. There are twelve overlapping frequency bands used 802.11b, which provide for three or four completely independent networks.

Attempting to associate with a network named "Any" or "" will usually result in associating the network with the strongest signal, depending on your driver and card. This is also true in other operating systems.

Perhaps it's more of a plug than a disclaimer, but I should mention I'm involved in LANRoamer, an open source system that you can use to sell passers-by access to your wireless network and other participating networks.

To those who've never been there..

[NanoGator]

I know most of you are gonna go on about how Starbucks is evil and a bunch of other irrational bullshit, I thought I'd inject some common sense from somebody who lives by Pioneer Square:

"Representatives of Starbucks and T-Mobile owner VoiceStream said they were unaware of any other wireless Internet presence in the square and had no comment on Personal Telco's objection."

Let me tell you something about Pioneer Square: Nobody's walking around with wireless devices screwing around on the web. To tell you the truth, the only way you could have found out this service was even availble was a quick blurb on the news. It doesn't surprise me at all that Starbuck's didn't even know it was there. Heck, it was sheer chance that I even found out about it. I go by Pioneer Square nearly ever day, I can honestly say I have never ever seen anybody doing wireless stuff there. (Not saying they don't do it, just saying that it's not visible.) I don't think more than a handful of people are aware of the 802.11 cloud present there.

Now, Starbuck's is right there on the square. They could set up a nice little antenna (heck, they could probably just use a $150 gateway, serious.) and it'd work just fine. This has nothing to do with trying to wipe out another service like it, it's just geography, it's just a coincidence.

Re:To those who've never been there..

[Omega Hacker]

It doesn't surprise me at all that Starbuck's didn't even know it was there.

Except for the part where several PTP members happened to be at Starbucks the day the T-mobile installers came. As I mention in my comment above, they talked for quite a while, with the T-mobile installers being made aware of a) the PTP node, b) how long it had been installed (some 6+ months by then, longer in testing), and c) what channel it was on.

As far as people not knowing about it, that is a problem we're trying to solve. If you saw the noon or 6:30 KGW news today you saw a piece about the node at the square and T-mobile's arrival. A week or two ago a half-dozen PTP members spent several hours handing out freshly-printed full-color trifolds explaining how to get online. Stickers are quite frequently placed at various locations, and promptly removed by Starbucks employees, but since it's not actually a public square, there's a limit to how much we can do legally.