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Researchers Test WiFi Access From Moving Vehicles
Julie188 writes "Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi."
I prefer the OSS term for this technology, "autoleech".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The multipath and doppler effects SUCK. This is why Wimax doesn't work well in vehicles and why the Mobile Wimax variant is more popular in such realms.
But once you have the physical layer taken care of, you can play cool little tricks like data queuing for WAPs to save cost. Locational awareness is also feasible to anticipate whether there will be a hotspot in a quarter of a mile or to go ahead with the transfer now.
When I hit one of these, it sort of grinds everything to a halt, as the phone thinks it has a wi-fi connection but does not.
San Francisco Photographers
There's been a fair number of stories recently of people getting in trouble for "stealing" bandwidth from unsecured wireless routers, and not just when using it for illegal purposes. I don't agree with this. I think it should be the owners responsibility to secure their network, but the possibility for legal ramifications exists.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
... so long as its not moving. If you're a passenger in a car doing 70mph you're going to be in and out of range of a wifi hotspot in a matter of seconds so what exactly is the point of this research? To prevent people getting bored in traffic jams in towns?
so what exactly is the point of this research?
To work as well as it did in the real-world tests they put it through? RTFA. Fucking idiot.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It could be useful on a bus -- they tend to be in cities, the passengers tend to be bored, and they don't go very fast. (Cars in cities too, but they tend not to have passengers.)
It might work on a train, but railways are less likely to be in WiFi range (tunnels, and the land around railways isn't often the kind of place you'd get free WiFi). It's probably easier to stick with the current system: have a WiFi hotspot on the train and let that figure out what to do (3G, Satellite, or however they do it).
Just because it doesn't work on your iFruit doesn't mean that it won't work with something that was designed for this purpose.
But how would a city bus line offering Wi-Fi negotiate carriage with every AP on its routes?
... researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time ...
but then a closer look found that in those cases, 99% had the SID "Free Public WiFi".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If you are in a wifi hotspot 15% of the time it offloads 15% of the 3g usage. Thats the point. 3g is expensive.
I've been saying it be over a decade: put the repeaters in the cars, create a dynamic mesh network. Don't correctly, a signal could travel hundreds of miles, from vehicle to vehicle. Pretty much all centrals of large populations would have WiFi access corresponding to the number of people using it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But how would a city bus line offering Wi-Fi negotiate carriage with every AP on its routes?
And would a bus using this technology in the Netherlands have to register as an ISP?
You need this, a box which eliminates doppler and multipath from 802.11 channels.
This seems to be leaning towards a variant of Ricochet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service) I was actually pretty bummed out that they failed. They were way ahead of their time.
The problem you describe isn't really a problem. It's been solved on a small scale.This could solve it on a huge scale.
There are many uses for connecting to the internet beside surfing and watching videos.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I feel like this is just encouraging me to use the phone and internet while driving. Awesome. Nothing more annoying than slow internet in slow traffic.
use two different technologies in the first place. Cellular technology is obviously the clear winner with respect to mobile data communications when you can't be tied down to a WiFi base station. It isn't the technology that's the problem, it's the business model. Since it's obvious Verizon and kin are running the wrong direction on this maybe it's time to look at ways to compel them to operate differently.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
11% of the time it works all the time
So the benefit of WiFi speeds can be used for extremely low bandwidth needs, but not high ones. Great, I'll be much happier that my 50 byte messages go over WiFi after a couple minutes than over 3G immediately.
Correction, 3G is artificially expensive (come on, NOBODY needs to account in pence per Mb any more!), sticking the equivalent of a basic business DSL-line connected DSL on every cell tower would cost nothing and allowing roaming between countries where the same operator is present in both (T-Mobile, I'm looking at you) means that's data is basically pence per Gb. You can QoS-limit it over the airwaves to prevent congestion (it SHOULD be the lowest priority traffic, even below SMS if that can be done) but nothing in the world stops 3G actually always being better than crowding a city with 2.4GHz meshes.
I ran an entire school with 150 machines off a 3G stick - in the centre of a large London town (about 10 miles from the city centre), situated in the middle of a busy shopping street, with god-knows how many other 3G users, with interference from hundreds of nearby phones, with several other 3G sticks just metres away (the actual dongle was stuck in the main network room in the centre of the building with miles of copper coming into / out of it, crammed against other USB devices), all getting decent connections and speeds and because it was only for an emergency, we ran for 8 hours with that configuration and ordinary users didn't spot the difference between that and their normal 24Mbps ADSL connection, even when the Internet was being used for lessons (admittedly local caching helped a lot). The deal we got was PAYG 3G on a £10 stick that, for £2 a day, let us use up to 3Gb a month. We did 3Gb in that day and bought ANOTHER lots of sticks / SIM's to keep us safe for the next day - we ran that config for 20 days while our broadband was restored (even though T-Mobile would only limit us if we went over on any one SIM, not block us or charge us). So looking at that, it cost us 66p per Gb, and was more than capable of running a school in peak period in a technologically busy city. We were quite within our rights to just keep buying 3G sticks, or even just PAYG SIM's, and carrying on with that forever.
3G is artificially limited by the carriers. Anything that competes with that is welcome because the carriers can and will just drop prices to force them out of the market (and then probably raise them again when they're gone). But there is nothing in 3G or 4G that stops it from doing a much better job than public Wifi whenever you can get any sort of 3G signal at all. 3G isn't "expensive", using current-day carriers that support 3G is expensive - there's a difference.
P.S. I have a stack of cheap 3G USB dongles if anyone is interested... :-)
"Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle.
"Hey my traffic can't be sniffed, hey my traffic is now being sniffed, hey it's secure again, now it's not!" Brilliant.
It's already been done in 2007 by Nokia and Siemens, and is part of the 3GPP standard. 3GPP TR 23.806 (for voice, but works for data too). Repeat after me all you Americans: International standards are better than propriatary ones.
Don't trust it.
More reading: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/wiffler-091610.aspx
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I certainly hope so, because that will help overturn the rules that imply same for hotels. It simply doesn't make sense; if it has to be regulated, it could just as easily be changed to "a hotel has to register as an ISP if it provides network access to others than their guests". It's besides the point though, as far as TFA is concerned. However, trains already provide Wi-Fi as we speak and buses may just as well - and they'll have a harder time convincing the powers that be that they're not serving the public. It will be nigh impossible to restrict access to people inside the bus, unless you feel like changing the passkey for the connection every you hop onto a bus.
The transit system around here was working on that for a while. What they did was set up a low power access point in the middle of the bus, and hooked that up to a cellular card. The effect was that you were using WiFi, but since you were in the same reference frame, you didn't have to deal with any of the random interruptions you would otherwise have to deal with.
The main problem would be in tunnels and plain old congestion.
Isn't this idea kind of what the 802.11p amendment that was published last summer was for?
Unless th vehicle is moving slowly then by the time the device has negotiated a connection with a wifi hotspot then its probably already out of range.
with the typical AP having only a 300m range in open air and traveling at 55+ MPH, they would be in and out of the AP quite quickly. But, if they were sitting in traffic then that would be another story. I've been quite disappointed with how many of the Android apps rely on 100% data connectivity instead of intermittent connectivity. Even the facebook app just dumps a notification and does not continue with the post or upload unless the user interacts with the notification. I found no setting in the maps/navigation app to cache the route but must rely on me manually scrolling through the entire route to cache it and then hit the road. Believe it or not, there are still dead xG spots out there and wifi-only is currently not an option.
Maybe this study will wake up the apps developers to intermittent connectivity and make the device much easier to use.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I take it you're not an AT&T customer.
>How about my garden hose?
I think your garden hose analogy is quite appropriate.
You are correct, that I should be able to walk onto your property and turn on your water and use your garden hose.
But what if you set up a sprinkler in your yard, and some of your water sprays over into my yard?
Should I be able to set out a bowl and collect the water that you are spraying into my yard? I think so.
Your hypothetical unsecured wireless router is broadcasting beyond the boundaries of your property, and by the protocol it is using, is announcing itself to the world as being available for anyone to use. Why shouldn't anyone be able to use it?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Am I the only one who is against the proliferation of data over radio? Be that wifi, 3g, 4g or whatever? It has been proven that radio waves transfer their energy to nearby tissue so if we keep this up, I think it's a matter of time before the human lifespan is 8 years old from radio waves induced cancer.
wireless networking is supposed to be a good thing?
"Hey my traffic is broadcast to everyone around me. Please sniff and brute-force my keys, before I lose them myself! I can't be bothered to do security Right, by installing a proper wired network."
Captcha: streams
Sarcasm off
Mod parent up
First, all the things you specified requires a user to come onto your property without authorization to obtain them. Radio frequencies spill onto adjacent properties unless you make an effort to prevent that from happening, with lower power or physical barriers (wet concrete walls or Faraday cages.) So it isn't a good comparison.
But beyond that, unsecured wireless connections usually have a DHCP server running on them that is in essence advertising access and providing IP addresses to any takers. So if you do nothing to secure your wireless network, and someone connects using a DHCP aware client, then you have invited them to use your internet access.
Now if you have wireless without an encryption key, and you've changed the SSID to , or you have IP filtering, or MAC filtering, or don't have a DHCP server running and are statically setting IP addresses on clients, and someone connects to your wireless by setting their IP or MAC address to a known good IP or MAC on your network, then maybe I can agree with your reasoning.
I love Wolfram Alpha:
55mph for 300M
I was wondering how do they deal with the various protocols sessions, jumping from wan to wan?
Crap...
I stupidly put angle brackets around the SSID I wanted to say - (donotconnecttome)
Isn't that what HIP is for? Maintaining identity/virtual connections as one transitions across multiple Internet access points? At first glance, this appears to be reinventing the wheel.
Here's a paper written by a fellow who's now a professor at U of I, Chicago which relates to the topic. The gist is that taxi's in a city were equipped with wifi and opportunistically connected to open access points as they traveled. The article won't revolutionize anything but it's certainly an interesting read and something worthy of building upon. One of the interesting parts is that the taxi-side wifi used a custom written utility to accelerate establishing a connection which didn't bother negotiating transmission speed but rather used a fixed 11Mbps as this was determined to be optimal for the setting.
I thought UMA was supposed to give mobile devices a Generic Access Network that would switch them seamlessly among GSM, WiFi and CDMA networks. We're already getting phones calling themselves "4G" - don't we have working UMA/GAN devices by now.
--
make install -not war
It will be nigh impossible to restrict access to people inside the bus, unless you feel like changing the passkey for the connection every you hop onto a bus.
Or unless the captive portal requires logging in with credentials issued by the transit authority. For example, even a bus system that doesn't operate on Sundays issues reduced-fare cards to seniors and people with disabilities, and it also sells monthly passes.
But how would a city bus line offering Wi-Fi negotiate carriage with every AP on its routes?
Actually they should make the Buses and Taxis the AP/relays/bridges themselves. A dynamic mobile grid if you will.
If I don't physically bar someone from parking in my driveway, that's OK?/quote>
The Supreme Court of the United Status has ruled that, yes, if you don't physically bar someone from your driveway then your driveway is public:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html
You WILL be happy about that when you don't get charged the world's highest per byte charge by the cell provider!
Well, in Portugal's capital, Lisbon, quite a few buses offer WiFi for a fee.
Yep. Cellphone companies generally charge 10x what they need to. Its criminal and the government should stomp down on them. Your SMS comment was amusing because SMS cost 0 to send ... they literally encode it into messages they were going to send anyways. The wasted data from their pov is in the bits. And they charge 10-15c each for those in many places.