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Verizon Pulling Plug on Free Wi-Fi in NYC
Cashen writes "'Verizon Communications Inc. is turning off the free wireless Internet access it beams from New York City telephone booths for DSL subscribers who use laptops away from home or the office.' Full article here. Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time? Guess we have to pay to play now ... The real question is, when is EV-DO coming to Michigan?"
It was "free" to VERIZON DSL CUSTOMERS. Yes, people that PAID for service.
I work for a municipality in the Tampabay FL area. We are rolling out quite a few EVDO installs,
and "per Verizon" we are one of their Bigger customers in this market.
The area I'm in is "Very heavily covered" (per Verizon) for EVDO access which is the broadband side,
and you automatically flip-dlop between that and the 1xRTT which is the "National Access" part of the system.
The EVDO if your lucky gets you anywhere from 350 to 768kbps (Don't use the Venturi Client)
while the 1xRTT drops you to 28,8 to 76kbps.
For an area that is "Heavily covered" I have had nothing but trouble staying in the EVDO side consistently.
However, If you need decent wireless connectivity because your on the road allot working from your car it
is better than nothing. Just a little steep on the price for the quality of the service.
I think that Verizon got a little ahead of themselves as they did when they first rolled out their DSL years ago.
I had to teach their engineers how to configure that for this area as well, not to mention teach the linemen
that bridge taps are bad as is fiber for DSL, but I digress
I am a technical support coordinator for Verizon wireless. I can tell you that EV-DO uses a CDMA cellular signal for the entire EV-DO capable part of the Verizon network. CDMA networks operate at either 800 or 1900 mhz which is HIGHLY regulated (and costly) spectrum. EV-DO is not an 802.11 technology from our end but as with most ISP's what you do with your bandwidth once you get it is up to you. You can set it up with a Wi-Fi router on your end but then as with anything else you are responsible for the security of the network that you set up.
Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time?
I'm sorry, but when did verizon communications become verizon wireless? VZW is not Verizon Communications, and EvDO is a completely different technology than Wi-Fi. If you honestly think verizon is pulling the plug on free wi-fi (which btw, is only free for verizon online customers) and replacing it with another company's $80 wireless data service, you'll need to educate yourself a little. Call me crazy, but it just doesn't seem like a good way to push customers along. The real reason is that no one actually cared about the hotspots. who's gonna stand next to a phone booth to use wi-fi? I believe I'm the only one. And the only reason I used it was because I was sitting in my car waiting for the street-cleaning nazis. Now I live in new jersey, get cable, and have EvDO. Now get out there and start buying EvDO, it's awesome.
But from what I hear, the Detroit rollout is pretty fucked, so expect the July light-up date to be pushed back until at least August.
Here's a tip: In each market where Verizon deploys EV-DO, they leave each site turned on after testing, but set so that only techs can access it. They'd rather customers get no data at all, than spotty coverage on a not-up-yet network.
Setting your card's "access overload class" higher than 9 should allow you to use the fledgling network. It should also make your traffic higher priority than anyone else's, so you'll continue to have service during periods of heavy use. (Use with care! Pushing out emergency traffic would be Bad.)
My current house has a fiber-to-copper distribution unit in an underground vault. For the 200+ homes served by it, it means at least 600 miles less copper wire between the vault and the CO. This is clearly the future for telephone service - until it is fiber to every home.
DSL is a technology that piggybacks on running RF over obsolete wiring that happens to be capable of carrying it.
And do you really want government-supplied, government mandated and government-controlled wireless service? With the monitoring, CPPA protection and everything that goes with that?
Verizon owns 56% of Verizon Wireless.
If you honestly think verizon is pulling the plug on free wi-fi (which btw, is only free for verizon online customers) and replacing it with another company's $80 wireless data service, you'll need to educate yourself a little
Wrong. If you would have read the article, you would have learned that that's EXACTLY what Verizon is doing.
I wonder which of these categories the Great Library of Alexandria falls into...
Planet Earth to Sharp'r: there are things that pre-date the US of A and (oh the horror of it!) even Capitalism! I know, unbelievable, but true.
The concept of a library is linked to free dissemination of information, which scientists and scholars since times immemorial considered crucial for development of knowledge. The "for profit" part is a rather late addition of the Capitalist era. It worked so "well" that shortly after most governments realized that they'd better do something or soon they will find themselves with a population of uneducated farm hands and all scientists living aborad. Enter public and government-assisted university libraires.
Unfortunately, as of late, this seems to be more and more forgotten and it appears that we will have to re-learn the old lessons all over again ... the hard way.