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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?"
Verizon is apparently giving people wireless modems/routers now, as I'm seeing them popping up all over my neighborhood. Most people don't know enough to secure them, and they're 802.11g, too!
people will just use the access points around...
come on anyone who buys a router now gets wifi on it and they leave it open OR you just discover the keys and break in (yeah it takes a while but thats life)
realistically wifi is here to stay and its kind of free (to those in the know)
most of the students I know dont pay they just leach of others bandwidth or plug into uni...
regards
John Jones
with their own gear.
As far as I'm concerned, if it's their stuff, it's their call. I DO have an issue with their lobbyists getting legislation passed that forbids other people from doing the same thing.
Take your trucks and go home, Verizon. Leave my toys alone.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The key phrase in the article is "better business model" = "way to make as much money as possible without being forced out of the market by competitors"
where's all that Karma?
How do you pull the plug on wireless?
"The real question is, when is EV-DO coming to michigan?"
I live in Alabama, you insensitive clod!
Get yourself down Starbucks - coffee and WiFi!
Well, at least WiFi...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
come on anyone who buys a router now gets wifi on it and they leave it open OR you just discover the keys and break in (yeah it takes a while but thats life)
Using an open access point is cool. I leave mine open and people are free to use it. Using a network that has keys on it is uncool. That is criminal because you actually are breaking into a system to use it. It is also stupid because most of closed networks are corporate network that have people monitoring them. There is enough open access points that spending the time breaking into a closed one is a waste of time anyway. I think most people breaking into closed networks do it more for the l33t factor despite being script kiddies.
The real question is, when is EV-DO coming to michigan?
Really? Since when would "stuff that matters" make it the "real question" when, or even if, an acronym for something that is for most both quite unimportant and uninteresting, reaches <insert place of choice>?
That question instead got me thinking of a mouse running in its wheel, and perhaps it was thinking "I wonder when I reach the end".
Infrastructor was my favorite Transformer. He ruled.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time?
Obviously not, if you read the article in your own link.
"A lot has changed over the past two years in terms of wireless access," said Henson. "Everybody's trying to look for a business model around (Wi-Fi).... But the better business model in our mind is the EV-DO network."
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
Now before everyone says it costs the city money, lets think about it. At City hall, you have a mayor you must pay anyways, the elected officials. And you have the city workers. So that cost is there regardless of what a city does.
The added cost, of having someone set up the service, well, would it be more than a company? I don't think so. At least with a city, you won't have a CEO pulling in millions of dollars a year, will you? And with a city, you can protect the workers, they can't get fired. In a company, at the very exact moment a CEO gets a 10 million dollar bonus, he can lay off thousands of people to save the company a few million. Don't that seem a little dumb?
Cities are the perfect provider for this service. For what a company will charge, a city can provide the service for pennies on the dollar. Just think about the economies of scale, a city getting the service costs reduced because of all the people, it is like buying bulk. It is the best value people can get.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.
I typically do a lot of beta for verizon...
Doesn't everybody?
What?
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.