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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.
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.
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.
Why would I need to have an expensive overcrowded spotty 3/4G coverage when there are hotspots every block?
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.
I'll be able to surf the web when I buy my sex cup and schoolgirl panties.