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Free Wi-Fi Coming To Japanese Vending Machines
cylonlover writes "Free Wi-Fi is on its way to some Japanese vending machines. Working much like a mobile hotspot at your local coffee shop, people located near the machines would be able to connect to the internet for 30 minutes at a time and surf the web. The service is available to anyone, to use with any smartphone, tablet, or computer and does not require the purchase of a drink from the machine."
Wi-Fi coverage is hindered by the fact that people have tried to explicitly set up Wi-Fi networks. This only makes it economical if users are charged for access and even then limits the availability to highly populated areas. But there's vending machines in many places - just throw in Wi-Fi hotspot in them and eventually you will get huge coverage and the costs are subsidized in the vending machine buying/renting price. If you need to make money on top of that, throwing in an ad or two should do the trick and keep the service free for anyone.
Shouldn't all wifi hotspots be free? I used to go to starbucks with my laptop and my sprint 4g overdrive and give everyone free access. Paying starbucks for a few minutes of wireless use is insane, plus they have not only your personal information but your billing information as well so they have your address and everything plus your surfing history.
Shoot, I think you should have to buy a drink. Why not?
Oh, wow, that's a relief. Here I thought we were starting to run short on potential points from which open spam relays and botnet commands can be reliably run and be even harder to trace. Thanks, Japan! The feds were starting to catch on to the last few places I could run all that from!
We all know that sooner or later wi-fi (or the new protocol at the time) will be available everywhere for free. The sooner the better.
I'm glad such a service is being made available in Japan.
Right now, you can either
- subscribe to a monthly 3G like service and use a small device that acts as a wi-fi server (~4000JPY a month)
- use, for instance, some wi-fi spots in some malls and coffee shops that work only for a given carrier (eg useable only with a SoftBank iPhone)
I'm just surprised that such a necessary free service takes that long to be implemented, not only in Japan but in most of countries I'm visiting. This is where we would have expected Google or MS (to improve their image) to be more pro-active.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
if you want QoS in your router so other people than the first bandwidth hog can do anything, you will be going to Cisco
True, but doesn't Cisco still make Linksys products that can be flashed with custom firmware supporting QOS such as DD-WRT?
tilt all data lost
There's a ton of "free" wifi services available in Japan, where "free" means that if you're subscribed to some service you pay for (mobile phone, home internet and what not) and are getting the wifi as a "free" add-on in the package. So, one can see tons of hotspots everywhere, but if trying to use any those requires an ID (or, very rarely, some payment). Somehow I think this will turn out to be one of those services, and not the really free free wi-fi.
This would be useful for Bitcoins.
Bit
coins
The former telco monopoly in Latvia uses phone-booths. It's just about the perfect solution to both wi-fi coverage and public phone disuse, I'm surprised I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Having just come back from a business trip to Tokyo, where as far as I could tell the concept of "public wi-fi" was non-existent, the ability to drop 100 yen into a public vending machine and hit the net would have been great.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The significance of this development is probably not obvious unless you have ever been to Japan. Vending machines there are absolutely everywhere. Whether you're in the city, some suburb outskirt, a picturesque country side village, or even halfway up some random mountain, the nearest roadside vending machine is rarely more than a few stone throws away.
Since Asahi is one of the big players in the market, this could be made into a huge WiFi mesh.
I too think it is a good idea. I seem to remember several years ago Verizon putting Wi-fi acces points in their pa phone booths, but they were free only to Vreizon customers.. and there are no phone booths anymore!
.. I submitted this story earlier and it disappeared form the Recent page. I was going for 3 for 3 for my subs, but I guess thats a bust! No hard feelings though!
Weird
Silence is a state of mime.
Here is the original press release (through google translate)
Silence is a state of mime.
Ever since the iPhone launched here (particularly since the 4), network signal has been extremely poor in busy areas, due to overcongestion. Every time I hit a major train station, my phone struggles to regain its signal, and it's impossible to load anything, due to the sheer number of devices being used, since practically every single one of the thousands of commuters waiting on & off the train are using their phones at the same time (Shinjuku station alone has >3.5M passengers per day, and a single 11-car train on the Yamanote during rush hour has 2-4000 people crammed inside). I'm just worried that these access points are going to become just as quickly saturated and as slow as the cell network. Not to mention that by the time you connect to the wifi point, the train's probably already moving away from the station. -_-;
Why would I need to connect to a wifi hotspot when I have 3G/4G cellular service on my phone? The need for more and more public wifi hotspots is definitely going down as more and more people get smartphones/cellular dongles. Personally I often prefer using my phone's 3G in the city since I don't need to worry about having an unsecured connection to a random router that may be running a transparent proxy collecting my data, I don't need to open my web browser to agree to their terms and it is often faster/more consistent.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
fail
Redirect users to some of Japan's finest porn to stimulate demand for the used panty vending machines. Everybody wins!
Clearly samzenpus has never had the pleasure of using a Japanese vending machine, which 99.99% of the time Just Workâ. Some even happily accept 10,000 yen notes (roughly equivalent to US$100) and give you the correct change.
I don't much like using wifi, and think it'll generally die out in favour of cellular data. However, when visiting foreign places, where my cellular data is super expensive or otherwise impractical (eg Beijing), I do appreciate the many free wifi hotspots available (Starbucks, for example).
A few years ago, the wifi hotspots were all open and so I didn't need to enter any password/etc. These days there seems to be a shift towards having passwords. For Starbucks, for example, it is usually just the store's phone number, which is easy enough. For McDonald's though, the network is open but accessing a web page results in a redirection to a landing page where you have to enter a phone number, to which a username/password is sent which is then used on the web site to open up the network. This latter scheme really sucks - obviously, you need a phone and if you log onto the network but don't go through the procedure, the network is still added to the list of networks to join (at least on all the phones I've used) and I have to go to the effort of deleting it - that's really annoying.
Personally, I think this is a great opportunity for NFC. Current uses I've seen for NFC are making the authorisation of bluetooth exchanges easier; but I think the same principal could be used for wifi SSID/password transfers. Those NFC stickers are very cheap and could be placed very near the checkout so you can just access them when you buy...which is the objective for most places anyway.
Sure, NFC isn't so prolific just yet, but you could do something similar with QR codes, I guess....just needs an app. Hrm, seems like something I could knock up...and I might just do that.
Max.
thanks for the information by: serba serbi and by perayaan tahun baru 2012
I'll be able to surf the web when I buy my sex cup and schoolgirl panties.
This approach has been used before in Japan: PHS ("handy phone") cells were placed on vending machines when the system was rolled out. I (mis)remember that the partner was a couple of Coca Cola franchises, which of course have thousands of vending machines dotted around. The benefits are ubiquity, guaranteed good power to the machine, no hassles about getting space on utility poles, etc. and regular visits from someone who can check the blinkenlights are blinken.
Last time I checked, vending machines aren't particularly portable, so I'm not sure why it's being called a "mobile hotspot."
... and then they built the supercollider.
I know they have amazing toilets, but what will the vending machines do with their wifi? And if the machines aren't willing to pay for it today, does anyone really think it will matter if they're getting wifi for free?
Hang out in front of our vending machine as long as you like! Free internet!
This is a fantastic idea. This kind of creativity it is what churns successful economies.
Around 2004--2006, I used to see numerous ads on TV for public telekiosks. They were basically a payphone, a Web terminal and a WiFi access point rolled into one. They were marketing toward business owners in high-traffic areas. I think the concept ultimately fizzled because portable consumer technology got more advanced, but this kinda reminds me of those telekiosks.
At first all I could think of was "God bless the Japanese", but when people can't get to the vending machine because of all the wifi campers sitting next to the machine then this will end pretty quickly.
There are a number of reasons why this push is being made that have nothing to do with improving "free" wifi in Japan.
1. Hardware refresh cycles; many vending machine operators are in the midst of upgrading their machines to accept NFC/Felica contactless touch electronic payment, especially since Felica/SUICA have defacto won the e-money wars. A necessary evil of that is a cellular modem to connect to the backend payment processing network. This is readily visible in early generation machines that have a small black blade antenna squeezed into the product viewing area on the front face of the machine (to protect it from vandalism)
2. Disaster recovery; the big earthquake in Japan sorely reminded people that the government sucks, and information networks can help disseminate information faster. There have been pushes by a number of companies with substantial retail presence that people frequented post-disaster to provide wifi services, with the ultimate aim of providing better communications support (and taking some of the transmission load off the cellular network). 7-11 convenience stores just rolled out "free" wifi service riding on the coattails of their internal network infrastructure connecting their store POS systems. Unfortunately, people have this false belief that the internet will survive anything, when in fact the recent disaster was comparatively mild for the Tokyo area, as not that much communications infrastructure was directly damaged. When a real rumbler hits and takes out all that last mile fiber optic and ADSL infrastructure, that's when people will be pimpslapped with the hard reality that nobody was really paying attention to WHY the internet was still working last march.
The smart thing is an interoperable wifi mesh network with active local exit gateways onto the greater internet where available (assuming sufficient line of sight density for outdoor vending machines). Based on the press release of pushing for a single year rollout of 1000-2000 machines, each with roughly a capacity for 12 simultaneous wireless device connections, something is a little odd. Either these are going to be vending machines located in areas with telephone line access (for ADSL), or possibly they are going to use LTE based wireless gateway routers. Also, it sounds like they might be doing ad injection using a local proxy (or at the ISP provider level since Asahi also is an internet provider/ISP), so keep those VPN tunnels handy. At least isn't Phorm...