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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.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/162825 7&mode=thread&tid=95
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Better solution = powerline broadband
The idea is to use exactly the same lines as the power lines for broadband. Nice!
How to Download YouTube Videos
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.
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
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
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.
Bell Canada is frickin huge. They own practically all the phone line hardware all across the country. Almost everyone (at least 99% of people) get their local service from Bell because there is no other choice. Bell Canada also has nationwide long distance service, mobile phone service, dialup internet access, DSL access (with limited areas of course), Satellite access, Corporate class web hosting. They own a large amount of the canadian fiber backbones (BellNexxia). To summarise, Bell is everywhere and if all their payphones had WiFi, it would probably be the biggest WiFi network in the world.
It is possible to surf the net from many payphones, and more still can send text messages and emails.