Bell Canada Turns Payphones into Public Hotspots

turing0 writes "Bell Canada yesterday announced a trial of a new public wifi hotspot service - currently free - with locations in either airports, railway stations or bus terminals in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston. Bell has adopted an interesting twist on the hotspot in that they have built a steel armored case, in which to house the AP, a DSL modem and power supply, which is the exact dimensions of a payphone -- and mounted the whole thing in place of a single phone where there are banks of them such as you see in airports and bus terminals or subways. According to this article in the Globe and Mail Bell has still not determined the pricing model." turing0 continues: "I attended the press conference at Toronto's Union Station, Track F, where I took a close look at the AP box which was mounted quite securely to a bank of payphones, and I was pretty impressed at how solid it appeared as various journalistic hacks took turns trying to pry the AP off the wall under the watch of Bell execs and a Bell phone tech. Bell is using Cisco AP1200's in the box as well as Alcatel ADSL modems with a 3Mb/Sec ADSL/ATM backhaul to the internet according to the Bell tech present. Various Bell types were wandering about with a pretty diverse collection of hardware such as Apple iBooks, Compaq PDA and IBM Thinkpads with 802.11 cards from Proxim, Cisco and Symbol as well as Dlink and SMC. Great use of a fully amortized asset (phone banks) and a very interesting spin on how to generate new revenue from a dying cost center - the payphone biz. Plus the added benefit of not having to negotiate new agreements with property management and landlords. Smooth move for Bell. Why didn't I think of that? Payphones, though declining in numbers, are still pretty much ubiquitous and are served with power as well as a good solid mounting location for the AP. In the final deployment Bell said that they would also be mounting AP's in the plenum and riser infrastructure of selected buildings should the full roll-out of the Accesszone product proceed. Is Bell Canada the first ILEC to recycle payphones?"

Comments

This is all well and good...

[jhawkins]

Until some 'Consumer Protection' group such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest does some expose (looking at their home page, I see: "Death on the Half Shell", "America: Drowining in Sugar", "Liquid Candy Report", "Tax Junk Foods!").

Someone will come out with some half-assed story that you can catch herpes from using these APs just like you can get the germs from the public phone handset. You will have to spray your laptop down with lysol before using, so you don't get viruses from the box that looks like a public phone.

payphones still in big use

[zogger]

--all you have to be is in any area that is infested with criminal alien invaders. The payphones are used extensively because they purchase prepaid international calling cards. They also get jammed all the time from the same criminals stuffing them with non US coins in an attempt to beat the cost by using cheaper foreign money.

As to the wireless concept, good for them, at least they are trying to come up with something useful, a new business model. Now I *prefer* to see wireless more take off as enthusiasts making their own nets, but it's all good until the bandwith get's hijacked completely by the larger corporations. It's a race now I guess.

Strange market

[Rudeboy777]

with locations in either airports, railway stations or bus terminals in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston.

OK, I understand those other cities, but last time I checked, mullet-sporting, wraparound-sunglass-wearing, Camaro-driving guys named Darren didn't care much about WiFi access....

Seriously this would be the US equivalent of debuting new technology in New York, LA, Chicago and Gary IN.