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

WiFi Ahoy!

[explosionhead]

The problem with all of these WiFi units is that as has been highlighted in previous articles, nobody is entirely sure how to make a profit out of them. As far as I'm concerned, things like Starbucks pay service are a bit too pricey for the casual user, who is generally relying on kind soles to open up APs for free

Oh well, guess we can just hope the leave them free :)

Re:WiFi Ahoy!

[pauljlucas]

... nobody is entirely sure how to make a profit out of them.

That's because there is no way to make a profit out of them. Most people, myself included, are just to cheap to pay per-minute/hour charges for nonessential communication. Most people simply don't need to get access to either the web or their e-mail now: it can wait until they get home/work.

The only people who would even be likely to pay are business customers on travel, but, even then, it's not a big market.

Do existing agreements cover this?

[Nonac]

Plus the added benefit of not having to negotiate new agreements with property management and landlords

This assumes that their existing agreements allow them to conduct any sort of transaction on the covered property. If it limits them to phone service, they will have to renegotiate. I can't imagine many property managers would sign an agreement that lets them put anything they want in that spot.

the answer to how to charge is easy...

[Traicovn]

"How you get people to pay for it is the big question," said Lawrence Surtees, an analyst at consultancy IDC Canada Ltd., adding that customers in the United States seem to think the service should be free.

Simple. Allow people to pay by purchasing prepaid cards or using their credit card and charging in block periods of 10 minutes. What's funny is that free wifi could possibly hurt the bell companies already failing payphone services even more if services that allow 'free long distance calls over the internet' become popular again. Although there is the bottleneck issue with wireless connections which would prevent that, plus the poor quality of such services usually (although I often get poor quality from many high-use area pay phones as well)

Bell Canada Megacorp

[maggard]

First off folks outside Canadia don't realize how HUGE Bell Canada is.

• They own my long-distance service.
• The own my local service.
• They own my cellphone service.
• They own my ISP.
• They own my satellite TV service.
• They own 1/2 the channels on the TV (Discovery, TLC, etc.)
• They own umpteen other things I'm likely not aware of and use every day.

Basically, if Bell Canada (or their holding company) wants to do something price isn't a problem, gov't regulations aren't an issue, and they're already so in bed with municipalities they can pretty much plug in anything they want where they want for as long as they want. In short if they wanna go WiFi they've got everything in place to make it happen, happen big, and nobody can compete.

Profit? They don't need to worry about that for a long time. They could support this for a decade while the market matures and its cost would still be in with the round-off errors of their ledgers. In the meantime they'll OWN the whole deal across Canada and be damn attractive to US sites looking for a stable partner. Forget .bombs, deal with a megacorp with lots of technology already in place. Pretty attractive to a hotel, airport, or municipality.

Yeah, I think this really could bring a big change to North America. The Baby Bells in the US are fractured and hamstrung. But with the market opened up to foreign ownership and activity Bell Canada may well have found their entrée into the US market. Widespread 802.11, first domestically then in the US, that could well be their opportunity. Forget cellular or land-line, offer a last-mile wireless.

I disagree

[PatientZero]

First, cell phone modems have very limited bandwidth. This is fine for downloading ring tones and getting maps, but would be less acceptable for surfing on a notebook. Also, my guess (I'm not in the telecom business) is that the cell phone network is more limited and valuable than the POTS lines, and the POTS lines are going unused. So, this scheme takes the old underused infrastructure and gives it new life with benefits for the user.

Additionally, I'd rather not have to whip out my cell phone and an extra modem and cable to look up an address on my Palm. In fact, I'd like to see them put hotspots on the actual buses and commuter trains. Can you imagine how many people would start commuting if they could play BF1942 on the way to/from work?

While you're at it, tack on an extra train car that houses a bar and a bunch of networked consoles or PCs. People would be riding past their stop on purpose!

It's already in the UK

[skinfitz]

Turning payphones into WiFi hotspots has been done for some time now in London; it's just not advertised. If you know how, you can use the bandwidth.

Not sure they quite meant it to be used this way...

Re:Tape Recorder Hacking

[tomhudson]

Yes it did. Not only that, but there was an even easier way on lots pf payphones in the '70's. Just tap out the number by pushing the hang-up switch - in other words, pulse dial the number rather than tone dial. No coins, no red box, no nuthin. I was more than a bit surprised when someone showed me this.

Re:Tape Recorder Hacking

[sharkey]

And getting the phone to ring back: 555 or 666 or 999 + the last four digits in the payphones number, hook-flash and listen for the "funny" dial-tone, hang up and walk off. The old ones would ring until answered. We found this to be great fun as kids.