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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.
I'd love to see payphones miniaturized and extended into both wireless broadband hotspots and VoIP phone points. This could lead to more bang for the buck for Verizon.
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
I can imagine some guy loading up a copy of aim at one of these hot spots to recieve a message "if you log out of aim, I'll shoot you, do not tell anyone what I've told you" etc.
they could even make a movie about it.. er
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
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...
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
Hey, you, get out of my office!
Yeah brain what are we going to do tomarrow night?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"...please insert another quarter to get one more megabyte"
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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. The business units responsible for them need to find SOME way to survive but ultimately they are a decade behind the curve...
.. 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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
And while we are at it, will they still have handsets for the rebels to zap back to their ship with?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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.
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.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
That's why Internet access is so important. Like, duh.
Or, hit up the Starbucks all over town if you want to pay $6/sitting for some internet access in Fresno.
-Pat
No, because thankfully Australia has superior "get a life" technology, which renders wi-fi at telephone booths hopelessly obsolete.
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.
Now the pawnshops near the darker, more secluded phone booths will have better, cheaper prices on handheld devices and laptops.
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?).
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.
magnanomous.
The most anyone could do is get past the authentication, so Verizon loses a little money, it's not a big deal. That certainly isn't havoc in my book.
Now what would be interesting is to have that wifi dsl and then also do an ad-hoc network and allow several people to get on through their own little gateway. Brings down the cost quite a bit I'd think...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
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
You never know...
Cheese and crackers, have you read the balance sheet lately? Verizon is up to its eyes in debt and its income won't cover financing costs, let alone the principal.
From the MCI / Worldcom adventure, they realize that the courts are going to let telecoms go into bankruptcy and wipe out debt. Since all of that investment in the 1990's is only returning 2.5% -- not enough to cover the financing -- they may as well build all they can in new and potentially profitable technology (wireless) and grab broadband market share (cheap DSL) before declaring bankruptcy.
They will continue to build infrastructure as long as there are creditors foolish enough to lend them money.
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.