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Recycling Pay Phones into Terminals
Roland Piquepaille writes "Two weeks ago, The Washington Post published a story about the death of the pay phone. It was aptly named "Requiem for the Pay Phone." Basically, it argued that as cell phones use increase, pay phones are retired from the streets. Now, according to Fortune in "Making Pay Phones Pay," Bell Canada is trying to change this situation. "Bell Canada recently started converting public pay phones in Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston into terminals for 'Wi-Fi' Internet connections. Some U.S. phone companies may soon follow suit." Check this column for more details and concerns or visit the Bell Canada's AccessZone page for details on the program and pilot locations."
When will we see the utopian frog-on-a-lilly-pad wi-fi stuff I read about in Wired?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Started including Wi-Fi access via their pay-phones for me, it'd make me not only a happier customer, but one willing to pay a bit more for service.
I believe there was a post on this earlier. I think this is just part of a growing trend by which blanket wireless coverage will supersede cabled connections.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/162825 7&mode=thread&tid=95
So know are we going to be able to use pay-phones as hacking devices like in the movie Hackers (and Hackers 2)?
I just thought of this.... Could it be a point of argument that removing pay phones reduces access to 911 emergency services for those economically disadvantaged who don't have cell phones? Have there been any studies done to test the validity of this (eg, crime rates vs. pay phone presence?)
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
...from a month ago.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
In case this seems familiar
If you look at the history of Canadian Telecoms, you will see that they are always on the cutting edge of innovation and implementation. From 'call features' to DSL and Cable modems across an entire province - like in Saskatchewan. Canada rocks!
I'm all for mass adoption of these technologies. But I can't see this being useful for another 10 years. When cell phones came out, they were more of a novelty. People were always around a land line, and didn't need the freedom. People didn't start to really need them all the time until 10-20 years later. I think the same thing about internet access everywhere. Sure it's cool, but how many people really need internet everywhere? By the time it will be useful, I'd guess everyones moving over to a different standerd.
And don't even get me started on the resurgence of phone phreaks!
1. I dont understand how they plan on making money, will you have to preregister with bellsouth, or whomever.
2. I see a lot of potential if this could be used in conjunction with PDA's, the idea of being able to walk to certain parts of the street and hit a DSL connection would be very nice.
transmission_err
What may seem new to North America, is a reality in many modern countries for at least a few years.
And no, it will not be a big success.
Why? Everyone has a cell-phone, and everyone has Internet at home - many even with broadband. So why go out in the cold and spend money for what you don't need?
I understand how pay phones make money.
Would this work the same way? I feed coins into a slot, and then my WiFi card sees a carrier?
Maybe it is even somewhat secure. Suppose after I drop the coins, an LCD screen tells me what to use for WEP keys. If every 10 minutes, I need to drop more coins and get a new WEP key, I can stay ahead of the guy in the van outside who is trying to collect a day's worth of data to break that first WEP key.
Or, it could be an open WiFi channel, on the cafe jukebox model. I drop the coins, and share the bandwidth with everyone else within range. I then use a VPN and/or PGP when I want privacy.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
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.
kawai
There was a Hackers 2?!? Oh god. On a similar note my friend made a 56k acousitc modem. :D
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Why don't we all band together, and whenever a user submits a dupe we all add them to our 'foes' list? Doesn't directly stop anyone from posting repeats, but if I knew that submitting one could get me hundreds of foes, I'd probably check my submissions for duplicates.
Holy dupe day, batman....
In the centre of my nearest city, I noticed payphones with e-mail, text, and internet access. 50p for five minutes of surfing, 10p for text message (cheaper than what my network provider charges (!)), 20p for email. Its pretty suprising, but thats just techology.
While this plan isn't without its merits, its also going to be without users such as myself for some time. No matter show secure the "FI"delity is stated, I get about the same warm fuzzies transmitting anything of any value over such a system as I would shopping online at an internet cafe.
And its not really the systems themselves that concern me, but the human error factors
This not to say I'd never use it
--- have you healed your church website?
Dupe 1 (orig)
Dupe 2 (orig)
Dupe 3 (orig).
Ok? Check the originals for more comments, I don't think it'll fly unless it's outrageously cheap and can maybe be paid just by walking by with an RFID tag or something else equally effortless. Geesh.
Unfortunately the page seems to have been brought down by the almight /., so I can't get specifics, but just how many sites do they plan on having running? I mean high traffic areas where people are more likely to have wi-fi cards like airports are good, of course, but would it really be worth paying a fee to use this?
I'm American, so I don't know how big an area Bell Canada actually covers up there, but in the world of business travel, where its unusual to hit up the same city more than say, once every two weeks, how much is it really worth to be on the internet for an hour per visit?
Now, if they could get some international cooperation for this, I can see it being viable. I mean, I know plenty of business travelers who would love to stay connected while waiting for adjoining flights in three different airports ov er the course of a day. But just in one area.....naaaaaaah
And of course there are always parks, stadiums, etc, but with the exception of parks that normally seems to be more of the business's perogative, and in parks....well, isn't it kinda cold up there? I mean who really wants to sit in the middle of a park at 3o degrees farenheit trying to type with numb fingers?
And also, to have a truly effective network, as well as a viable profit option, you'd have to have massive blanket coverage over a large area, but wouldn't that be a little cost prohibitive, especially since relatively few people use wi-fi cards in the mass public? Neat idea, but......
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
Recycling Pay Phones into Terminals!!! more like celda
Karma whore is cloning comments from the original story:3 102
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=47606&cid=486
Maybe people like me would use the pay phone more if it were 10 cents per a call, not 50-75 cents like it is now. And maybe I would have a "land line" phone in my home if it weren't nearly $50 a month after taxes, FCC feens, 911 imposed fee, etc.
Or, the monolpy phone companies can just coninue to loose money and customers to cell phones.
[/rant]
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
...the sprit of Canada's inventive iniative to recycle pay phones has prompted Slashdot editors to recycle the popular site's headline stories.
This is a case of deja vu. Is someone messing with the Matrix?
As for secure, please remember that the information backbone of general America, the phone lines, used to be fooled by someone using a cereal box toy to make a certain tone. If you build it, they will break it, and you won't find out until your pants have already fallen to your ankles. Intrusion security into the actual network may get better, but theres always some asshole whose user name is sex and his password is daddy, and boom, hello wi-fi network where most people don't even use firewalls.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
I will kick your ass!
YAY! I live in Kingston! YAY! Now I can go downtown and surf! YAY!
Oh, wait. Crap. I don't have an 802.11b card, and I killed my laptop's screen and keyboard. Well, that's a bitch.
Would have been nice, checking my e-mail down at confederation park.
I wonder why they chose St. Lawrence College. It'd be cooler at Queen's University, especially since my school is ON the Queen's campus.
how your penis might work: 1) Your penis spots and attractive male and/or female that looks like a man.
2) Your penis alerts your brain that you would like to engage in gay oral/anal shenanigans with this man-beast.
3) At this point, you've got AIDS.
4) You just point your penis at the man-beast's anus, let's call you gay because you are.
5) The man-beast says "NO!"
6) Your penis shrivels and is sad. A single lone tear falls from it onto the ground.
7) The man-beasts's penis realizes that you are a pansy and alerts the man-beast to this fact. The man-beast then sends HIS PENIS to http://your.ass.bleeding
8) Your anus is introduced to the man-beast's penis.
9) Your penis requests a reacharound.
10) Erection comes up - man-beast begins jacking you here.
11) You climax quickly and the man-beast laughs while he continues to pump you.
12) The man-beast ejaculates and withdraws - leaving blood and semen pouring out of you.
Hey, did you see Oprah eat that chunk of feces on TV today? That was fucking awesome!
here is something to take a look at, maybe someone can repost it when there is an actuall xbox story.m l
http://maddox.xmission.com/xbox_suckit.ht
(i'm not putting it in the simple anchor tags so you actually have to copy and paste, i figure this should keep his server up for a lil while)
Funny how I wrote an article three days ago but Roland Piquepaille is writing almost the exact same thing that I did. Mere coincidence? In any event, here's the abstract of my article:
"The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even payphones. The internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along."
Read the rest of it here: How Warchalking Died
How to Download YouTube Videos
Why don't the phone companies try to get Congress to pass a law that allows them to jam your cell phone transmissions if you're within 50 feet of a pay phone?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
I propose a new section: reruns, where /. editors can post the same old stories over and over, and the /. crowd won't have the right to bitch because it's in the rerun section.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Modify slashcode so that if a user submits a dupe, he/she is banned from submitting a story for X amount of days. This would still leave a gaping hole because anonymous users could post dupes, but it would be better than the current situation. Perhaps slashcode should have automatic duplication checking? Some code that would check stories from say the past 2 weeks and look for inordinate amount of matching words and/or phrases? I would do it myself, but I'm not a PERL haxor. Anyone here know PERL? Slashcode is an open source project, fix it! If we took the gross of the amount of hours spent writing about duplicate slashdot posts and put it in to slashcode development for duplicate story checking, dups would be nonexistent.
Especially in Europe, where there are smart meters and/or smart-card-enabled pay stands.
Modern parking meters are electrified already, so maybe it'd be a good way for metro areas to raise a little revenue? I'd pay the city for wireless
"Will Bell Canada make money with these Wi-Fi hotspots? It's hard to guess, especially if this service is offered for free, as it is the case up to the end March."
And I now have to pay $50/month for cable? I'm moving to Canada, at least until the end of March. Which also causes me to add a question to the list of things I need to make sure an apartment has when I'm renting one..."Does the water work? Is it near a pay phone?"
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Bell Canada is trying to change this situation. "Bell Canada recently started converting public pay phones in Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston into terminals for 'Wi-Fi' Internet connections.
So now we'll have to pay how much for phone calls now?
Actually, I'm sure that there are a number of ways to make money and still keep the customers happy. In an airport, I could charge the customer a buck for unlimited time. When the carrier drops, I assume he's done and gone. Since the bandwidth is shared, I can accomodate the occasional person who stays on all day, and the guy in the house across the street with a directional antenna.
But I don't understand the point of your comment about security. You seem to be saying that since locks can be cut, broken, or picked, that there is no point in having locks.
By providing WEP keys, you are giving the customer a reasonable expectation of privacy, especially if the keys are changed faster than current technology can decrypt them. This expectation of privacy is an important legal distinction, and can be useful in prosecuting the person who cracks the security and abuses the information gained. Many people rely on the legal system to deter theft and vandalism, rather than relying on locks and fences.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. We may not be able to prevent all armed robberies, but reducing the odds of my getting robbed at gunpoint is a worthwile endeavor.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
in a areas where people don't have cellphones there's no money in turing the payphones into hotspots; if there are no cellphones there sure aint gonna be a lot of people runin round with laptops...
So the payphones will still be there for what I politically-not-so-correct usually refer to as "the poor".
BT has been doing this in the UK for ages - I think I saw the first ones (in Liverpool St station, London) in late 1999 or early 2000. There's one on the corner of my street now. (Brixton.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Hmm - so each payphone is going to have the bandwidth of [roughly] 1 DSL line. This doesn't sound like much.
The other problem I forsee is that people living near to phone boxes may just decide to use the WiFi instead of getting DSL installed depending on how it's priced - this would be bad since the WiFi bandwidth could get used up by these static users (Although the phone company wouldn't care if they still got cash).
On the plus side, it may mean that many more exchanges get DSL capability installed.
-- Mike
The University of Toronto is already doing this for its 802.11b connections. However, they do payment by assigning an account to the MAC address of your wireless card, which means that you only have to authenticate once. (Are MAC addresses easy to spoof?)
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I used several different types of these toll-booth terminals, run by British Telecom, on a recent holiday, and discovered something not to my liking: at least the way BT does it, you'll have trouble with sites that consist of more than bare HTML. The thing was Windows- and IE-based, of course, and it did not do Javascript well at all (though it didn't seem to be a performance issue). Also the terminal refused to work with WebObjects sites... so without those two I couldn't check email at all. Waste of a pound or two.
Now Bell Canada certainly could use a better implementation. BT at least screwed this up.
but not only _do_ they use them, replying to their beepers from phone numbers that aren't easily traced to them, but police and cities have discouraged phone companies from providing them there because they want to discourage drug dealers, and this is most common in poorer urban areas. Pay phones used to be able to support incoming calls as well, but the telephone deregulation changes in the 80s and early 90s that let them be privately operated instead of only run by telcos killed that, because private operators didn't get any revenue from receiving calls (and also, the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs also meant that drug dealers would use them to receive calls.)
A few years ago, before I got a cell phone, I was trying to hunt for an apartment or house to rent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This involved a lot of trying to contact landlords and property managers to get in to see places that were advertised, but they're never in their offices - you call their beeper or answering machine and leave your phone number. I did have a beeper, but of course with no PAY PHONES around, it was hard to call them back. In some areas, there'd either be a 7-11 or else a restaurant that had a phone in the back, so if we'd left enough calls in a given area, we'd get coffee and more quarters and wait. Really frustrating....
Of course, pay phone usage in poor areas also went down because of low-cost lifeline phone rates, and because deregulation meant that the prices of pay phone calls went way up, and in high-crime neighborhoods, a coin-operated pay phone looks a lot like a parking meter - it's a box of money sitting there for any teenager with a spare metal pipe, unless it's in a well-lit high-traffic area.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bell Canada Turns Payphones into Public Hotspots5 7&mode=flat&tid=95
Posted by michael on Wed Dec 11, '02 11:59 AM
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/16282
(*) : Bell Canada actually offers very good service, ground lines phones, cell phones, dsl, it's all good
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Offtopic, I know, but you've got a great sig.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
If you never bring your wi-fi into the cafe, you will never know if the cash register is transmitting your credit card via wi-fi. Hardee-har-har. Oh, and you better not buy anything over a cable modem because that's a shared connection that can be sniffed. Your dial-up traffic is also sniffed by the local bell. Better give up now and go back to barter. They can't take things off of you can they? Oh my, yes they can. Sorry.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
--I see the opposite with payphones around here, they are heavily used. Our county has increased in population about 25% in the past 3 years, almost all "recent arrivals" of questionable legality. They use the payphones for local stuff or with calling cards to call home with. About the only problems (that I have seen) with it are they try to use foreign coins and they get stuck in the coin boxes sometimes. I don't know if the phones are profitable anymore, but they keep them in, so I guess they are.
"go get laid or something"
Yeah, my point is that I use my mobile phone as an aid to do just that. I'm not the one who started being bitchy on a fucking geek-oriented web-site!
Oh, and i'll be getting laid from wednesday when the American girl i`ve talked into coming over to London to stay with me for a week or 2 gets here. So you'll forgive me if i don't post here for a couple of weeks.
It is possible to surf the net from many payphones, and more still can send text messages and emails.
While the original story's a bit of a dupe, but the general idea of enabling payphones to do things other than just make phone calls is a good one.
The whole idea of a wireless accesspoints is doomed to failure. Why? For the reason that anyone who can afford a laptop + wireless card is almost certainly going to own a mobile phone. The additional cost of a modem link between the mobile and laptop is a marginal one. Furthermore, the economics are likely to be such that it would be cheaper to dial up your ISP via the mobile than to access the wireless link on a payphone.
However, SMS and email have filtered into the lower socio-economic echelons of society - the groups who have traditionally used payphones. This automatically gives any SMS/Email enabled payphone a large user-base.
Furthermore, I'd much rather tap out an SMS on a large payphone keypad than on my mobile phone's liliputian keys. Lots of other people would feel the same.
For the telicos, SMS/EMail are technically much simpler to implement and there are fewer of the security hasstles associated with wireless. Furthermore, the costs associated with transporting hundreds of bytes of data from an SMS or email are next to nothing.
Already, Telstra here in Australia are implementing SMS on some of their payphones. It will be interesting to see how they go.
Tried one out the other weekend at Union station in toronto. They look really neat too. I was going to use the payphone and saw this big silver can with a glowing light where the payphone usually is.
Nonetheless, the service is fast, seems faster than bell regular DSL and the range these tin cans give out is fantastic, especially considering Union station is mostly solid concrete.
I have to say, I called it here (attached to the previous story). If you think about it for a moment you realize it's an interesting idea. I wouldn't expect this to work for another 2 or 3 years though. There simply aren't enough people (and devices) that need/want wireless access to the Internet when they are mobile. A cell phone is more than sufficient for most people. I was approched by a company just a few months ago that is going to do something very similar in a large chain of retail stores. Wireless is the next "big thing", but you aready knew that... right?
In the Netherlands we have these kind of 'payphone terminals' installed by our national telecom provider (yes, the old privatized giant). You can find them in larger train-stations and on the streets of our major cities. I've never seen one being used though. Although we are behind in a lot of tech things over here, compared to the US, mobile phones isn't one of them and I think that if the coverage of cell-phones the US ever reaches the same levels as over here you can kiss profitability on whatever land-solution goodbye. Pitty though, I think payphones are a necessity and the terminals _could_ be quite usefull.
Karma? What's that again?
I live in Germany where there's a _lot_ more cell phones than in the US, and I thought pay phones were doomed five years ago, so I scooped slashdot by a long shot.
And at first it looked like I was right.
Telekom, the old monopoly, was dismantling them left and right.
But now they are popping up again like mushrooms. Interestingly, It isn't Telekom that's doing it. There seem to be small companies that can make them pay. They also seem to be popular - you see people using them a lot.
It doesn't make any sense to me, but it is an undeniable fact.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems
and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting
language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best
dangerous.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
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