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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?"
Sounds like this is a good solution. Why can't electric companies take advantage of this with their electric poles? They can run all their network stuff side by side with their electricity lines and then they could offer phone service / internet service via their network down areas that have nothign but poor dialup. And since they already have the job half done (poles / wiring up) it could be quite cost effective. They could even run the networking down the electric lines themselves, i saw on /. that being done in europe somewhere. Then they could just have some sort of converter to wifi from that.
Here is a working link which talks about the service.
Should be interesting competition for starbucks and the like who wanted to come to Toronto and setup hotspots.
[alk]
Here is some more info on the hotspots, including a picture of it!
[alk]
Especially in Canada. This the ISP that was first in Canada to impose 5 Gbyte bitcaps on so called "unlimted" usage, after redefining what they observed "unlimited" to mean in the AUP. Their 50$/CDN ADSL-lite per month doesn't include about 28$CDN for a typical land line required. Recently they have enjoyed a customer expansion due to promotions offered only to new customers, but have failed to expand their infrastructure to accomodate the higher loads. They offer a lousy 1Mbit "high speed" ADL-lite or 3Mbit "ultra"(good luck unless you are next door to a central office!) which is the only broadband option to cable based service.Worse, they are pushing their lame anti-virus and spam filter services for 5$cdn a pop. They are so generous - they even have a 35$ adsl "basic" - the 1Mbit product cranked down to only 128Kbit and 1Gbyte capped. Bell has never given anything free - don't expect then to start now- you'll be pulling out your wallet very soon;)
This took place at Toronto's Union Station, which I walk through every day. Bell also has Internet phones mounted in place of regular phones in a few places there.
I've never used one of these Internet phones, but they're basically a regular phone with a larger colour LCD display, keyboard and laptop-like pointing device. It's a pretty cool idea, but I've never seen anybody use it and I wonder if very many people would pay for wireless Internet access in a train station where 99% of the people don't wait long for a train during rush hour.
Also of note, Bell's ISP, Sympatico, has stand-alone pay per minute Internet access terminals in the station. Why would Bell compete with itself on so many levels?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Easy:
/., and it goes through.
1) Your laptop/PDA/whatever requests an IP address via DHCP.
2) Access point hands out IP address, makes a note against that IP address that "has not paid yet"
3) At this point, all that you can do is access HTTP and DNS.
4) You point your browser at any web site - let's say http://slashdot.org for grins.
5) DNS succeeds.
6) Your computer does an HTTP GET.
7) Access device sees you've not paid yet. Sends HTTP REDIRECT to https://fork.it.over.to.me
8) Your laptop looks that up. Gets an IP address.
9) Your laptop requests page.
10) Page comes up - input credit card here.
11) You do so. Access device marks you has "paid for 1 Hour". Ports open up.
12) You again try
www.eFax.com are spammers