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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?"
Is there any info on the dispersement of pay phones? Will this blanket major cities?
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Guess they gotta do something with those pay phones now that everyone has a cell phone.
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
?
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.
2 is charge out the ass to use them
They (Bell Canada) already have those little cubbie-holes with ethernet jacks at airports, etc, so execs can plug in and surf the net through a really limited proxy. It was like 20 bucks for a half hour last time I saw 'em at Pearson Airpot.
Y'all keep dreaming of your free broadband.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It'd be kinda fun to offer my kids their own phone line, but install a pay phone to cover the cost.
--
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.
with locations in either airports, railway stations or bus terminals in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston
Well, you would think that they could narrow down the locations better than that.
Toronto? Okay, let's spread out and find where the APs are located here...
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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.
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?
Broadband will never be free, but it'll get cheaper and cheaper....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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!
Ok, I understand how, with a "Public Internet Terminal" like those cheesy ads on DirecTV, you get paid by people putting in money or swiping a credit card. How does this work with a wireless access point? Your card is going to pick up a signal. You may not want to key your credit card info over the airwaves to this unknown box. Do you walk up to the box, swipe your card, then key in the MAC address of your wireless card?
Basically, what's phase 2 where
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
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.
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]
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.
Here is some more info on the hotspots, including a picture of it!
[alk]
Thats what people thought *before* the .com bust.
.com optimism faded away, companies sat around in the boardroom and realised that they'd not only have to *make* a profit, but do it without all the vaporware 'killer apps' that would make everyone and their uncle want their service.
I see the price getting higher and higher for less and less service.
Comcast used to offer 2M down, 768k up as its regular service. Now the regular service is 1.5/128, and the aforementioned is the 'Pro' service, at a lofty premium.
Bell Canada, IIRC, now has monthly bandwidth limits on their once 'unlimited' DSL services, and charge by the byte once they're reached.
After all the
It's all downhill from here on in.. Enjoy the ride.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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;)
"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)
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
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.
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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,
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Cheif junior assistant overseer, TIA
First you get an account. You can do that using https; https will ensure that nobody nearby can see your CC details. Normal authentication will allow you to check the URL before signing on.
Once you have an account they need to protect your/their bandwidth from theft. They can do that with VPN software; the VPN software will prevent you from connecting to the wrong box.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Phone companies have almost free bandwidth back to their own ISP. Power companies don't. They'd have to pay both a phone company and an ISP for bandwidth.
Bell has still not determined the pricing model
Uhm... so they don't know how to make money from this yet? Okay, this isn't gonna last.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Be prerpared to have your mailbox blasted with spam from the Bell sympatico.ca domain!
- 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 don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm not saying I like it, and I'm not trolling. If the parent post had been funny or sarcastic it would warrant no response other than a good laugh. But the poster seems to believe that any other typical for-profit corporation would provide this service for free and that Ma Bell is somehow an aberration. Sorry to burst your bubble, but when corporations are driven by profit for their shareholders, altruism becomes a breach of contract if it surpasses minor PR-value donations.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Woa, bell.ca is slashdotted. Time for a new meaning to 'telco-grade'!
And I wonder how they can currently protect themselves from abuse; high-speed anonymous access=spammers/hackers haven!
have you been defaced today?
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!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
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?
Rabbit were one of the other major operators.
The idea was sold as 'second generation cordless' where you used the same phone at home with a base station on your land line, but it would work within 100m or so of a public hotspot - normally near payphone banks as these had the infrastructure and were in obvious places.
Never really took off as it lost a fight against the improving analogue mobile phone coverage and handset technology. Also if you took the handset with you when you were out, what were the other members of your family meant to use?
BT over here in the UK sold a similar product recently that was a GSM mobile, but with a DECT (Digital European Cordless Telephone originally, now Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) air interface as well, called Onephone. The idea being you could register it as a cordless handset with you DECT base station as well as have it on a GSM network.
When you made a call out it tried DECT first for lower call costs, and of course if you are in range of your landline it would ring as any other handset. It couldn't handover a call from system to the next as this was technically impossible and I have no idea what it did if it got a DECT call during a GSM call or vica versa.
To make it really useful BT sold a personal number service that would try you landline first, then try GSM to get through to the handset so you could give out a single contact number - but it was fairly expensive to rent.
Suprised that this idea hasn't been tried more often. But this is getting offtopic so a discusion for another day methinks...
Now add into the mix that coffee shop is Starbucks, and can easily afford to sue the people running the phones. WiFi is going to get heavily regulated, and soon.
I predict that within the next 18 months they do a story on terrorists or bad, bad hackers using anonymous access points to do bad things and a real regulatory crush gets on, the real purpose of which will be to ensure that only Big Companies can compete to provide public WiFi.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I'm in Montreal, right downtown, and I hoped there would more 'public' areas available, but the majority seem to be 'semi-public'
There's a list, with more promised in the near future, but for now its..
Toronto, Ontario: Union Station Panorama Lounge, Union Station
Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, Pearson International Airport, Terminal 2
Kingston, Ontario: Confederation Park and Marina St. Lawrence College
Montreal, Quebec: Panorama Lounge, Central Station
Dorval Airport, Departures Area Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, Dorval Airport
Calgary, Alberta: Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, Calgary International Airport.
So we have airports and train stations, not the kind of place to sit for hours just to serve up some mp3's, but since the 'Gare Central' is 5 minutes away on the Metro, I'm gonna head down this weekend and see what kinda speeds I can get
I hate spyware and spies
Dude, this is the largest owner and provider of communication lines in Canada and likely one of the largest in the world. I know that they're not going to put their corporate web site on an OC-48 with a google-like server farm, but it's still just a little amusing to see a large corporate entity that conrols millions of TBs of bandwidth get /.ed.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Obviously, these hotspots are going to be more or less obsolete when UMTS is up and running, but I think that if they can get it up and running fast, it is a nice idea, and good for the transitional period.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Bell is definitely pervasive in Canada, but (for the Americans who don't know, but still care) thankfully you don't HAVE to go with them on a number of aspects.
You can go with alternative long-distance companies; they may or may not have to pay Bell for the "privilege," but if you're not a Bell supporter then you can at least avoid paying the whole enchilada.
Cellphone service can be provided by Rogers or Telus if you're so inclined. Personally, if I needed a cellphone, I think I'd go with Telus... any company that markets their products with squirrel monkeys can't be all that bad. :)
With satellite, you do have at least one other choice, StarChoice. You can also always go with cable, if you're willing to deal with the cable company (Rogers for me, often Shaw elsewhere or Videotron in Quebec).
ISPs, now there's a sore spot. In terms of DSL, the only alternatives are generally small, local services who still have to pay a bit to use Bell's lines. It's either that or cable (again). On the other hand, I know that at least one DSL provider in Ottawa supposedly goes without a transfer cap.
So you do have alternatives in most areas, but more often than not Bell is there in some capacity, or else you go with the dominating cable company in your area. At least Bell is better than AOL Time Warner down in the states, who practically dominates what Americans see and hear...
What I want to know is how will the acess be billed and authenticated? Are they going to use special WEP keys? or some software that you have to install? What platforms will they support.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
By putting quarters in the payphone - duh!!
Seriously, as long as you registered the MAC address of the card (say, on the Bell Canada Web Site), then all you need is a pocket full of change to get access. How about 5 cents a minute, or a $1 per MB transfered?
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
And if you are that desperate to get free service that you are willing to have the IP over DNS package installed on your machine at home, and are willing to take the massive throughput hit, more power to you. You represent such a tiny fraction of the universe that you are not even worth worrying about.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Instead of scribbled notes above the payphone of "For a good time call...", it'll be "For a good time browse to..."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've spent a lot of time in the Toronto and Montreal train stations and airports and as far as I can tell, those are all lounges for first class or preferred customers. I wonder what the range is.. if it's line of sight or shorter than a few dozen metres, then these are hardly 'public' access points.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
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...
I wonder how they plan to prevent people from abusing this? Some spammer, who's had his nth ISP toss him off, could just take his laptop and head for the subway. Blocking only port 25 would work because spammers also use open proxy servers on other ports. And if you start blocking too many other ports, what's the use of this? (Hmm, will they try to block KaZaa?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
around here in a long time. Stores had them removed because the were being used for drug deals, and here in California everyone over the age of 8 has a cell phone :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
haiku...
/haiku
superman rushes
to save toronto, instead
crashes broadband trunk
This space for rent.
Kingston is a relatively major hub along the VIA Rail Windsor-to-Montreal line. Greyhound has lots of routes to there too. It's sort of the last stop before Ottawa or Montreal. You have a point though...the station is TINY. Not too many people stick around. Not like Union Station in Toronto.
Careful, Tom Ridge doesn't like open access much. If 802.11 is not not encrypted, you must be a terrorist -- see that article the other day.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Seriously, this is a really big problem. Property managers are simply not the smartest, most forward thinking people you can deal with. Their motto seems to be: "why should I have to?"
I mentioned this to BT (UK) a while ago...They have been putting these new payphones that have Broadband, text messaging, Phone, email, web all in a phone box. The logical extension to this would be to add a WiFi areial. This would be a minimal add-on in cost and provide great service for certain types of WiFi users.
/b
They basically ignored the idea and thought it wouldn't work. I hope this proves them wrong. Imagine being able to pull up next to any payphone and get internet access. In my opinion this is one of the best ways to spread the range of hotspots at a cheap price. They don't even have to sign up the HotSpot locations as they own the spot already.
[Please type your sig here.]
I actually replied to this:
It seems using hotspots is a better solution all-around than using cell modems, but again I'm not in the business.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Er, this would be SO INCREDIBLY insecure it is not funny. All the machines connected to the WAP would be on the same ethernet segment, thus making a man in the middle attack a joke. All you'd have ot do is run Ettercap on the connection (SSL or not, it makes no difference), and boom, you have his CC info. Using IPSEC would alleviate this problem, but that would be a more complex requirement to add onto your customers.
Not really. Bell Canada (AKA BCE) owns the majority stake in every local telco in Canada *except* Telus. Thus they own pretty much everything east of Alberta.
What he described is exactly how almost all airport wireless access works right now. You use the browser, it redirects you to a an https page where you can buy service for a day.
I've used them before, and yes I give them CC data - when you're going to be in an airport for four hours and you happen to have a laptop it can be pretty handy (or invaluable depending on crises at work).
Basically, I just check my CC bill for a few weeks after to make sure nothing funny is going on. You probably are safer in an airport though than some random public access point served by a payphone.
I wouldn't have a problem using these terminals either, if I had a pressing need for bandwith out in the open near one. I'm not sure when that would happen though as out in the open I tend to have someplace to go, unlike an airport where you are stuck.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Earlier this year I was in Toronto on holidays, from Australia, and tried to access my back account online.. since my bank uses Java rather pointlessly, it didn't work from the internet access terminals in my hostel.. I then went to these terminals, and they didn't work either. I then went to the "internet cafe" at the "world's biggest bookstore", which thankfully worked. Except they were the same P166's I used when I was there in 1999. Scary.
well its true my cable modem's now capped BUT there's tons o idle fiber out there... thats bound to be put to use when things turn around.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Have you ever BEEN to Canada, man? Ever sat out in the middle of August in hot, humid Ottawa? Or watched the sun NOT set north of 60? Or enjoyed spring weather in the middle of december in Calgary because of a Chinook?
Do you think it gets colder in Toronto than, say, Minneapolis? And I live in Vancouver, where it almost never snows all year. It just rains hella.
Don't worry, most of your countrymen don't have a clue, either.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.