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

hrm...

[xao gypsie]

i wonder if this is also a bit of a security risk. i mean, yes you can have some kind of authentication procedure, but will that stop everyone? and besides, once on illegaly, who knows what havoc will be wrought.....
just a thought.

xao

How Much?

[ewhac]

Verizon is obviously not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Even the telecomm analyst says this could be a, "moneymaker." Yet conspicuously absent from the press release is any discussion of pricing.

Is there any word on how much they expect to charge for this? How the billing will be performed? Can you use your laptop as-is, or will you be required to install some custom software (almost certainly Windoze-only)?

Schwab

Re:This is a pleasant surprise.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Not to mention the fact that with a wireless link you don't have to worry about what the last creap who used the phone was infected with...

...Though your laptop might.

Pricing wifi?

[CaffeineKills]

Hmmm, maybe they plan to have some type of system where the wifi transmitter is only turned on when you insert the correct amount of money. Also, they mention high speeds but they never clarify, what kind of network are the phones gonna be hooked up to?

The future of phone booths..

[i.r.id10t]

.. when we all have our own portable phones/pdas/computers/etc. will be a space that provides privacy and quite, as well as either a damm good external universal anteanna setup or a hard wire.

I also predict that you will be able to drop a dime/quarter/etc. in a glass jar and get a free connection, since pay authentication will be sound based.

How would you use it?

[zutroy]

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.

Re:How would you use it?

[the-dude-man]

well not quite...you see those transmiters have an average transmittion range of 50 meters....so its more like creating a wireless grid over the streets of NYC...so if your sitting in traffic for example...you can be talking on GAIM.

As it stands now though, you can walk down 31st street and see people with laptops sitting on the bus stops doing one thing or another....so people would be willing to sit down and work with a laptop on a major city street. However, the options are not limited to this.

I amagine verison would end up selling a service to subscribers...authentate people to the network, and then you have wireless access as you drive the streets of NYC with access to the internet...it would be kinda cool if wi-fi wasnt as secure as the stream of piss going from me into the toilet.

wi-fi not quite ready

[the-dude-man]

I really cant say i think wi-fi is ready for this

In its current capacity....wi-fi is very insecure...its ok for inside a corperate building... and for a home network...but out on the streets? Currently there is nothign to secure wi-fi connections, i have an access point in my house with 2 laptops on it....when i was setting up the last one...in order to debug a problem i sat there and sniffed the traffic...the traffic over wi-fi goes over the air with no security protocols on it at all....now ethernet isnt much better (with the exception of wrappers like PPPoE to help disgues info) but its also not brodcasting to everyone within 100 meters.

The problem isnt the traffic being sniffed...i can fix that with a simple ssh tunnel...my problem is with the machine authentication...its basicly a clear text (well not quite...but from a security stand point it basiclly is) protocol...i can drive thru downtown boston and spoof myself onto any wireless network I encounter...a simple shell script chooses a victim and pretends to be them..there really is nothing to it.

Now for small restricted locations, were the general public dosnt have access too..this really isnt THAT much of a problem...however, if you have people subscribing to this, in downtown new york, out int he open...unless they adapt their own wi-fi protocol....they are basically putting hundreds of thousands of free victim for a hacker with a "war drive".

the tcp porton of the protocol can realistcally stay the same...but we need to find a better way to authenticate boxes onto the network at the physical layer. Right now anyone with prisim II drivers can wonder onto any wi-fi network they encouter.

Wi-fi is definatly cooll...i run it at home because its nice...but for a production network, I just dont think wi-fi is at that point yet.

Re:wi-fi not quite ready

[miu]

1. Forget about WEP
2. Set up a radius server
3. tunnel trafic through ssh (as you mentioned)

This is similar to what T-Mobile does for auth currently. The problem is that standard RADIUS lacks many of the capabilities needed for this environment. Once a reseller market (like the dialup market) develops things will get even hairier.

I have the feeling that public pay-for-access wireless may actually lead to some of the first real life diameter deployments.

Charging Technique

[Corpus_Callosum]

I'm sure this will work the same as most broad-band in-hotel services. A NAT will not pass your packets until your MAC address has been authorized to do so. Until then, only outbound port 80 traffic does anything -> It redirects to the "Authorize this computer" webpage.

Perhaps existing Verizon customers can log-in to their account and authorize a MAC address (I'm sure it will be made easy), or a quick credit-card transaction will activate service.

I highly doubt you would ever have to actually "touch" the phone-booth. Just get close, flip the lid on your powerbook, have Safari auto-fill your authorization and away you go.

Re:Verizon and privacy rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think for a moment that Verizon is standing up against the RIAA because of customer's privacy rights. They're fighting because they don't want a precendent set. The cost of responding to every request by the RIAA or another organization to hand over customer information would be huge.

For further proof that they're not the BFG you imply, there's also their plan to sell customer's calling records: see the EPIC letter.

Egads, I've turned into a bitter Slashdot geek.

Josh

Pricing Plans

[Robspiere]

The article says they're "studying pricing plans." I wonder if they'll do a flat rate or what. I imagine they'd just put a DSL modem and a 802.11x box in each phone, and as we all know, once the cost of installing the base stations has been recovered, there's really almost no operating expense. They've got the DSLAMS in place around the city already and the could make support on the web only.

They're not likely to give it away, though. If they're smart they would tie it into their DSL service. They could provide one concurrent WiFi login per home DSL account. It could be your same login/password that you use for the crappy PPPoE service at home, and they could use the "captive firewall" as described above.

That might make me switch from Road Runner cable modem.

This is what I like to see....

[Dr Reducto]

I like to see companies piggybacking new technologies onto existing infrastructure. That guy who was trying to cover the nation will fail because he has to set up nationwide infrastructure, whereas Verizon has a space in most cities.
In addition, payphones are probably already laid out through the city to provide optimal reception (payphones have to occur at certain places and every so often). Also, not having to rent out new space in Manhattan is worth its weight in gold. The cabling is already in place, they just need to add a $30 piece of hardware to the top, and they'll probably use a large antenna to ensure a decent line of sight. The only thing left is to make them tamper-proof (fortress router anyone?).

combine with VOIP?

[TracerJPN_USMC]

Why not combine this with a packaged VOIP service.. beats standing in line for a pay phone right? stay within 50 feet or so of the phone, break out your laptop and makes calls via VOIP. yes i know my sig is broken.

Re:americans and payphones

[unitron]

"As Americans, we're all trained to look for pay phones,"

And as one of those well-trained Americans I've noticed that the proliferation of cell phones (and probably increased vandalism as well) has resulted in a rapidly dwindling number of payphones, and when you do find one it's probably owned and operated by mom and pop's fly-by-night phone company instead of whatever real local (even though probably now owned by a giant conglomerate) company that actually owns the telephone wires in the area.

Re:What about stealing credit cards?

[rusty0101]

Depends upon the actual implementation involved. If the AP has a secure web server built in, and uses an encrypted tunnel to check on the credit card and start billing for time, you should never see a decrypted card number outside of that box.

This would require that the web page that you go to to "log in" to the AP redirects to the secure server. I doubt that this would be a significant problem.

For Verizon DSL or fixed rate customers, authentication could be accomplished through an RSA or PGP/GPG public key authentication check. You would have to sign up for it from home, and generate a public/private key set, give Verizon the public key, and keep the private key on whatever device you are going to use on the network. Yes this would present a potential hacking threat, so I would want to use a seprate key than I use for my own e-mail, or stuff I sign.

Obviously these are hardly the only possible solutions.

-Rusty

Re:A last gasp

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a last attempt by independent business units to make pay phones viable. The fact is that pay phones are very obsolete technology but very expensive to maintain.

Yes, but there's much more to a phone booth than just a phone. The phone companies can sell ad space on the side of the phone booth for far more than it costs to run a phone booth. That is a big moneymaker.

I Wonder If...

[istartedi]

...this will keep payphones from going extinct, and maybe even bring them back where they've disappeared. That'd be cool. Maybe they could even roll out a lower bandwidth version for inexpensive pay-as-you-use internet, just to get email and stuff.

One laptop, many providers

[gad_zuki!]

Wireless ISPs have to have some kind of mutual pricing scheme or its just not going to take off. Here in Chicago there are more than a few wireless providers, each taking a very small chunk of the city. Say I wanted wifi access at the coffeeshop next door I'd have to pay x amount per month or a pay for a punishing day pass price. The other coffeeshop or the wifi at O'Hare wants my money also, but I'm sure as heck not paying all three of them a month. That would be like $100 just for occasional wireless access.

Wifi cannot be sold like this. Its like a different owner for every cell phone cell in the city. "Oh so you drove into my cell, pay $30 a month buddy!"

There is a huge need for some kind of central billing authority that all these ISPs can share. Its this, spotty coverage, or some big monopoly is going to waltz in and buy all these small providers.

Considering that 802.11's range is exremely limited I don't see how anyone could be making real money off of it when it comes to in-store access. The coffeeshop has one lousy AP and even with a kick-ass 802.11 card you can't get much further than the curb outside the store. I'd much rather see business treat wifi as a service for its customers like free newspapers, bathrooms, etc. A DSL line and an AP and some authentication scheme isn't that expensive. I'd much rather pay a couple pennies extra per cup of coffee than pay yet another wireless provider.

Noise?

[marcushnk]

isn't this just going to generate a bucket load of radio "noise", that will make Wireless networks of businesses harder to setup/maintain..

I really don't think that this tech was meant to be used in such a "overpopulated" way..

Re:What about stealing credit cards?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I think the Poster's idea was to set up a laptop as a phone access point. Basically like the phony ATM scams. You see all the right stuff, they capture all your secutity details, and then at the last minute get a "Oops" internal system error, while they max out your card and/or clean out your checking account.

Back in high school someone had a BASIC program they would run that looked like the Novel login screen. People would type in their password, and it would right the information to the cracker's account, and then log off. The victim would think it was a random glitch.

That's OK the moron was dumb about being smart. I think he might actually be able to access a computer without his probation officer present sometime in 2007.