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Time Warner Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Hotspots
Hotspots writes with a link to a BusinessWeek article discussing a new service that Time Warner Cable is offering to its customers. Flying in the face of most business decisions about Wi-Fi availability, Time Cable customers will soon be able to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots. This privilege comes as Time Warner inks a deal with the Spanish startup Fon, which is already operating a similar deal with ISPs in Europe. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available. Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running."
They couldn't maintain a cable internet connection at my house much longer than 30 to 45 days before some contractor screwed up the line amplifiers in the neighborhood, or a squirrel gnawed through their cables. Then, after waiting twenty minutes on hold listening to sales pitches for their digital phone and security monitoring, I get told it will be two to three days before someone can come out to look at the problem. Good freakin' luck.
Roadrunner works GREAT for me. I couldn't be happier.
Obviously, some people have better luck than others. I am a very happy RR customer and look forward to using these hotspots as they come online.
The article isn't too clear on this, but if you go to Fon's site at http://www.fon.com/, you'll see that Fon defines three user types:
Aliens - Non-FON users who pay for access at FON access points belonging to either of the following groups.
Linuses - FON users who do not receive any monetary compensation (other than a majorly discounted router), but get free access to any FON access point owned by a Linus or Bill
Bills - FON users who get 50% of the proceeds from aliens using their access point. They don't get free access to other FON APs owned by Bills or Linuses.
So if you live in the middle of nowhere, it makes lots of sense to become a Linus. Your AP will almost never be used by others (and if it is, you can restrict their bandwidth to a reasonably large degree), but you get free access to any other FON APs when you're on the road.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
They are not proposing an open connection, but rather a closed one where everyone who is a Time Warner customer would have a login that would work on every participating hotspot. Logins and sessions would be tracked, so they would always know what login was associated with what IP for a given time. This takes care of the legal problems (unless people share their passwords), but does open up some privacy ones as this would allow Time Warner to have a mountain of data about when people are on the internet (not necessarily where they go, but when and where they connected).
Yes, you are missing something.
You maintain a hotspot (with two SSIDs, one with a 10 digit WEP key, the other open) and let people access your hotspot over the open SSID. In turn, you either get half the revenue generated on your hotspot, or you get free access to any other hotspot operated by FON. If you live in a high density area (near a Starbucks, big apartment etc) you can subsidize your hotspot, if you don't you get free wifi roaming. If you're not interested in either, don't get the router. It's not like Time Warner is going to force you to sign up.
They charge $2 a day for access and don't have density in the US yet (they're bigger in Europe and Asia) but they seem to be growing. Personally, I've run across one FON hotspot when I actually needed one, and found two more when I didn't really need access or had a wired connection, but there's a Starbucks near my house (in Toronto) where the Chinese restaurant next door runs a FON access point. I've never been (don't like Starbucks coffee) but my friends use the FON signal all the time.
Ultimately, what this means is that Time Warner is allowing (encouraging?) people to maintain open access points, and will update their terms of service to reflect this.
AT&T (nee SBC, nee Ameritech) DSL customers in Chicago (probably all IL) get access to all their wi-fi hotspots for a token $1 a month. You get pretty good tech support too, they'll patiently walk you through the login page, rest your password, etc. at 9 PM for $1 a month. Death Star maybe, but they do their homework.
We have a large list of all the zones in our district, all with specific building codes and regulations that state what we can and cannot do with the cable. Some places actually ban us completely from burying any new wires or doing anything to repair them (as the construction/tearup of the ground would look unsightly), so the most that we're left to do is to try and neaten up the cable as best possible (though some city zones even forbid this. You don't want to be a customer living in those areas.)
Slashdot - Come for the creative thought, stay for the lesbians!
Inside the Time Warner group RR is Road Runner (yes btw that Road Runner) this would be the name for timewarner cable internet service
the reverse dns for a Road Runner customer should look like cpe-#ip address#.#region#.res.rr.com
this breaks down to
cpe= Customer Premises Equipment
ip address = what do you think?? you do belong on Slashdot right??
region = "which" timewarner
res =residential service
rr.com = primary domain
(oh btw triad ips seem to be more or less static)
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