Verizon To Offer WiFi At Pay Phones

Makarand writes "Verizon has ambitious plans to catapult pay phones from the pre-cellular era to the WiFi era by creating hotspots around pay phones using an extension of their DSL service. The current plan is to upgrade 200,000 pay phones in the New York metro area to provide a WiFi service. Although major metros are spotted with hotspots, finding them is usually a big problem. Verizon thinks that specially marked WiFi enabled pay phones would solve the problem of locating the hotspots." Sounds similar to Bell Canada's move to do the same.

Comments

Verizon is making me happy

[friedegg]

The Wi-Fi at payphones has potential, plus they just lowered the Verizon DSL price while increasing the download speed, AND they're standing up for their customers privacy rights. Now, if they'd just unblock port 80...

Re:americans and payphones

[sTavvy]

AFAIK thats not the case here in Australia, that might be different if 95% of the population didn't have Mobile Phones!

Re:How Much?

[GreatDave]

I'd imagine they'd just use a "captive firewall" application, like some hotels use for their in-room DSL access. In other words, you fire up your web browser, and all traffic goes to their box which asks you for a credit card payment before opening you up to the world. IOW, there's no need for some quickly-hacked Visual Basic program to do this.

Re:Your connection is about to end...

[justzisguy]

Quarter for a megabyte? Not bad considering AT&T Wireless is raping people with 1-3 cents per kilobyte!!! God damn that is some expensive wireless access.

Re:War driving

[gnarled]

The article says its an extension of their DSL service, in other words these people are already paying them. There would most likely be some sort of authentication.

Re:How would you use it?

[raju1kabir]

I'm wondering who will be willing to stand next to a payphone, attnetion focused on a laptop, in the middle of a major city. It seems like an open invitation for muggers.

Presumably people who, unlike you, don't live on dirt farms, driving pickup trucks and having sex with livestock.

Have you been to a "major city" recently? Or indeed ever?

Here in Washington DC (ooh, scaaaaaaary) I see people with laptops sitting out everywhere, including parks in all sorts of neighborhoods. When I'm in New York they're likewise ubiquitous. I've even seen people typing away in subway stations.