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

Good Idea

[blackmonday]

Guess they gotta do something with those pay phones now that everyone has a cell phone.

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 :)

Implications

[Lu Xun]

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.

Wow!

[TerryAtWork]

We've /.'d Bell!

Note to self... Check eBay.ca later today

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

It'd be kinda fun to offer my kids their own phone line, but install a pay phone to cover the cost.
--

wifi = Great

[pr0c]

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.

Tape Recorder Hacking

[Nevermore-Spoon]

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

There's something..

[craenor]

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?

Terrorists.

[FreeLinux]

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!

How do you take payments on this?

[mhesseltine]

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

1. Install public 802.11 access point
2. ???
3. Profit.

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[HeghmoH]

I don't know how they actually do it, but one easy scheme comes to mind. The network is kept open, but unidentified users are blocked. Any port 80 requests are redirected to their authentication server which asks for your username and password. It also has a signup page where you can give your credit card number and get a username instantly. Once you authenticate, outbound connection are allowed, and you're good to go. If you're afraid of putting in your credit card over a wireless connection, well, one hopes they'd use https, and if you don't trust that, then you should probably just keep all your money in your mattress anyway.

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[wowbagger]

Easy:

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 /., and it goes through.

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.

Link

[loconet]

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.

Picture

[loconet]

Here is some more info on the hotspots, including a picture of it!

Don't expect a free ride from Ma Bell

[waldo2020]

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;)

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)

Also from Bell

[digidave]

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?

Re:Also from Bell

[gorilla]

Why would Bell compete with itself on so many levels?

I think it's because it's basically a win-win situation. In places like Union station there are banks of pay phones, and maybe enough traffic to justify 10% or 20% of them. Replacing one phone with an Wifi stand, another with an internet phone and a third with a calling card machine, and they've still got enough pay phones to cover all the traffic. The wifi stand and the internet phone are competing with each other, but the sum is greater than either alone would be.

Why power companies aren't doing this

[Nonac]

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 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!

Statistically speaking...

[Cap'n Canuck]

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?