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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?"
Guess they gotta do something with those pay phones now that everyone has a cell phone.
Of course, anyone wishing to use these hotspots will have to persuade the clueless moron inside, trying to call home and wondering why his quarter won't fit anywhere, to come out.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
We've /.'d Bell!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
It'd be kinda fun to offer my kids their own phone line, but install a pay phone to cover the cost.
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I wonder if I can get them to put a payphone with an AP in my living room.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
remember the old taping the sounds a quarter makes when insterted in the coin slot and playing it back into the phone to get free longdistance?...wonder how long till someone makes a knoppix disk that boots up and gives free WiFi access
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
About using the words Canada and Hotspot in the same sentence that just seems wrong in so many ways...maybe it's just me, eh?
Well, there you have it. It's always been suspected that the Canadians were terrorists but, this proves it. Only last week was the US Justice Department talking about the criminality of open access points and now Canada does this.
Karma: Excellent -- Well, we'll just see about that!
In keeping with it's new policy of declaring free wireless access as a means of aiding terroists, the US government put Bell on it's list of terrorist organizations and warned all companies that they risk the same fate if they adopt free wireless access.
The US military has sent a Delta force team into Bell HQ to take down the terrorist ring leader.
Your subversive post has been noted in your permanent record!
We suggest that you ameliorate the damage to you digital citizenship by reporting three of you evil, hacking, music stealing friends to TIPS.
hugs and kisses,
-- Harry Tuttle,
Cheif junior assistant overseer, TIA
Be prerpared to have your mailbox blasted with spam from the Bell sympatico.ca domain!
My ISP called saying I was using more bandwidth than "the average user". I replied "an average is made up of highs and lows, correct?
Yeah, and statistically speaking, the average user has one breast and one testicle, so what does that prove?