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New Zealand Converting Old Phone Booths Into National WiFi Network
An anonymous reader writes "What do you do with old public phone boxes hardly anyone uses? Convert them into a national network of WiFi hotspots is the answer in New Zealand. While others have converted their old phone booths into libraries, toilets, showers and even smoking booths, in New Zealand 700 hotspots will be live by 7 October with a target of 2000 by the middle of 2014. 1Gb of data will be free to customers of the incumbent operator, others have to pay for monthly access."
Last time I was in Hong Kong many of the phone booths were being used as APs for the phone companies pre-paid wifi network. Seemed like a great idea to make use of their even spread across the city.
They don't want their customers to have free wifi. They want their customers to have free wifi and everybody else passing every day by a 500kg reminder of them not being with the correct operator.
They pulled the doors off after a SCOTUS ruling showed that they were a private space with a legal expectation of privacy. Once the doors came off the communications were considered public and OK to record.
I do still miss the less trackable days of pagers and phone booths from a tinfoil hat point of view though.
You're missing the point. These locations already exist, have leases, power, data, and a visual presence. Hopefully paid data will help subsidise these dinosaurs. I haven't used one in almost a decade; it was before I had a cell phone and wanted to call someone that did have a cell phone without my (then) wife knowing about it. Even then the phone didn't take coins, so I had to go into the adjoining dairy (convenience store) to buy card, which I never used up. I sympathise a bit - just a bit - with Telecom as in our neighbourhood these phone boxes are routinely etched or the glass smashed. I have no idea how they've been making money for the last few years.
They did set this network up as free to use for all in the Canterbury area after the quakes, which I thought was nice.
PROTIP: if your first thought on reading about a project is "that's so flagrantly impractical as to be absurd", it is possible that you have misread it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I was one of those 175'000 customers who trialled it. And I have to say the speed was reasonable and you can't complain about free WiFi on the street. We were travelling NZ for 6 months and we used it all over the place. It tended to be the most reliable connection you could find, even better than sitting in a café and using their WiFi.
I know it's not that phone box model but converting them into a fleet of TARDIS would be far better. They could deliver you data before it has been sent. That's being fast!