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Study: There's a Wi-Fi Hotspot For Every 150 People In the World
mpicpp sends a BBC report on a study that found there are, on average, 150 people per Wi-Fi hotspot, worldwide. In the U.K. alone, there is one hotspot for every 11 people. The study estimates there will be roughly 47.7 million hotspots worldwide by the end of the year. France has the most, followed by the U.S., the U.K., and China. Future growth is expected to be high:
"Over the next four years, global hotspot numbers will grow to more than 340 million, the equivalent of one Wi-Fi hotspot for every 20 people on earth, the research finds. But this growth will not be evenly distributed. While in North America there will be one hotspot for every four people by 2018, in Africa it will be one for every 408. While Europe currently has the most dense wi-fi coverage, Asia will overtake it by 2018, according to the report."
They have "Flag this comment as inappropriate" icons in the posts, now.. Please watch out for any real censorship here.
Wifi hotspots are easy to spoof by a hacker to feed your computer viruses and steal passwords. I avoid them the best I can unless I'm super desperate to use the Internet. The more common they become, the more hackers will set up shop and steal people's passwords.
What's the point of a "flag as inappropriate" icon? Isn't that what moderation is supposed to be for?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In Germany, people have started creating a free as in freedom wifi hotspot network, offering restaurants bakery shops and cafes to join. There is no login. No tracking. Just surfing.
http://freifunk.net/en/
Because freifunk has no login at all, it has a good positon according to TFA:
"At the moment you have to have a separate log-in for every hotspot and ultimately the winning providers are those that will offer the easier access experience," she said.
Hotspots just enable hackers to do stuff that previously only NSA and friends could and did. We should design the internet in a way that its irrelevant for security from where you are using it, and who sits in the middle.
Still low compared to college dorm/cheap apartment ratio of about 10 years ago - those folks are spreading out, and spreading expectations.
We sometimes see ideas spreading 'virally', but really, largely shared ideas are often established generationally - the 'viral' ideas are usually just those ideas exposing and exploiting those slowly growing generational ideas that have been growing as people's desires and needs shift.
Wifi is an expression of this expanding set of generations desire to be ever connected to faster information and resources through computers.
It's a neat time to have grown up in - and I don't think we've fully imagined all the places we can go with it.
It's sort of a 'real' version of the previous generation's largescale exploration of meditation, medication and spirituality, only made consistent, shareable, but oddly balkanized. For instance, there's still awesome music involved in all of it, but more sort of everyone's flavor of the month, and seemingly fewer universal classics than previous generations.
Ryan Fenton
Having traveled a lot in both rich and poor countries, I have come up with a general rule of thumb: the richer the country, the worse the Wifi access. It's always the poorest places that have completely open wifi absolutely everywhere.
Fuck your "homespot", get off my lawn. Doesn't "not given the option to opt out before receiving it" sound like digital rape? There will be no vendor supplied WiFi in my house, no sir.
Per TFA:
"US provider Comcast caused controversy when it introduced its public home wi-fi service in the summer because customers were not given the option to opt out before receiving it.
Such "homespot" public wi-fi will see explosive growth rising to more than 325 million in 2018 and taking wi-fi "from the cities to the suburbs", according to the research."
Credit: http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
All major France ISP provide a set-top box for their customers that does DSL modem-router, WiFi access point, TV and telephone. The WiFi access point also provides a hotspot service for the neighborhoods. I guess it explains the high numbers.
And yet they tell us bandwidth is a scarce resource.
Yippee!!!!
There was a Cory Doctorow novel where the protagonist tried giving everyone in Toronto free wifi, and a younger kid pshawed him, because most people were connecting through mobile data connections now. I'm in the Middle East, where most people can get virtually unlimited (for all intents, 1TB) of mobile data for $25 per month. My last time back in the US, I was surprised to see that everyone still expects free wifi.
Because it is rural. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Without a definition of "hotspot" the story is useless. Is every unsecured home WiFi router counted? Secured store WiFi that you get a code for when you buy something? Unencrypted walled-garden sites? Pay-only unencrypted WiFi?
This seems more like a count of APs, not hotspots. They don't mention what you can do with them. If you have to pay to get to the Internet (other than cafes that you have to buy a coffee), then it isn't a "hotspot" it's paid wireless internet.
Learn to love Alaska
If you have a look at what sites like Wigle.net are reporting from wardriving the global total is somewhere over 147 million wifi locations. While this may be over reporting as the old wifi spots do not get aged out, this will be offset by areas that have not been covered yet. USA seems to be the most collected with over 53 million wireless hotspots. France strangely only reports a little over 3 million hotspots... nowhere near the 13 million suggested in the report
More stats can bee seen at https://wigle.net/gps/gps/main/stats/
Country stats at https://wigle.net/gps/gps/main/genslicestats
and the most interesting the maps https://wigle.net/gps/gps/Map/onlinemap2
Most at least.
it doesn't sound like a count of ap's too much though? or maybe it is..
without reading the article(duh, wha the fu you expect??) I reckon it's hotspots as in paid(one way or another, like being a customer of a certain operator) hotspots. in some places the isp's blanket neighbourhoods with these - as alternative to getting a dsl line.
why? because for those it's easy to get stats. that, and the french are kind of dicks so why wouldn't they setup for pay hotspots like mad to get off the free moochers...
besides, most smartphones sold nowadays are occasionally hotspots or at least capable of being one..
you know whats really funny though? the cheaper the hotel, the more likely it is that the wifi is free of charge. if the hotel is expensive then you have to get stupid fucking codes that you get for hourly or daily rates and the daily rates generally being more expensive than it costs to buy a data sim for a months access in said locale...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As the article states, currently you have to log in to each hotspot individually. Are there ant plans to implement the protocol which enables you to migrate between hotspots in the same way as you move between cell towers, with each hotspot handing over your connection to the next? This could be useful for pedestrians in city centres, shopping areas etc and would relieve the load on the 3G networks in areas where lots of people are using data connections on their mobile phones. So that as you move between shops you do not have to keep logging in to a different hotspot.
...you will need:
1). 149 friends (Facebook friends count... but not followers on Twitter, Snapchat. Kik friends count but Whatsapp friends only count as half a friend)
2). Complete form WIFIHS 101 (available from a main UK post office)
3). Submit documentation (including two passport sized photos) by post to the address at the foot of the form
Your wifi hotspot will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. It will be set up as near as possible to the post code you have selected on form WIFIHS 101.
Please note: your wifi hotspot will have a three-month duration until the next survey. Data charges may apply.
Funny thing is that is way too many people per access point for most consumer grade hardware in use.
I tested the data for my own country (Netherlands). That website claims we only have 10 hotspots in trains, while all our intercity trains now have wifi. Also, municipalities should be having only 25 hotspots, while entire city centers have free public wifi now. It's a load of rubbish, this website.
I understand it is difficult to get the data... but if you equate the lack of data with "zero", then you make a mistake.
If we could evenly distribute the WIFI hotspots globally and use some sort of open inter-connectivity then we might be well on the way to making ISP's obsolete.
A global network made by the people for the people.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I have a Cat5e cable for each person in my household.
When i go outside, i dont want to be "connected" to anything but the people who exist in the real world.
Call me old fashioned, but trust me, the world (and most of the people in it) is a beautiful place. Just a shame most people can only exist when their being engrossed with a 5/7" screen in-front of their face 24/7, whilst ignoring the real life around them.
The BBC took a bit of iPass marketing and is passing it off as news.
More than a decade ago, I worked for an ISP that worked to integrate it's dialup internet service with iPass so that our clients could roam and get better service than the old Sprint/GTE Telnet dialup/dumb terminal service offered. iPass was then in the business of coordinating service providers to share with each other - and it still seems to be in the same business, but with WiFi hotspots instead of modems and phone lines.
BT, the largest broadband supplier in the UK, claims thousands of WiFi hotspots across the UK. How it does so is by the simple but dubious, and arguably highly unethical**, act of making just about every private WiFi router an open hotspot by default, without going to much (indeed, pretty much any) trouble to let the user know that it's actually doing so. If you're tech-savvy, you'll probably notice; if you're not, you probably won't. And once it's open, if you decide that's not such a good idea, my understanding is that it's not something you can easily configure for yourself; you;ll need to phone up BT and explicitly ask for the open access to be removed.
(Slightly second hand data - I'm not a BT customer, but one of my family is.)
**I say "unethical" above because, the last I heard, the UK courts regarded what happens on an open WiFi router as being the responsibility of the owner - meaning that BT have potentially laid thousands of blissfully unaware customers open to prosecution for unwittingly permitting a complete stranger to commit one of any number of acts that the law would frown upon. Not clever, and not something I've heard BT comment on.
If you count our phones HotSpot capability, we've got 5 WiFi HotSpots for 4 people in my house - I know several people whose homes are passing 2 HotSpots per resident.
Hotel rates are largely determined by who is paying.
Expensive hotels often cater to people on expense accounts who really don't care what the bill is.
More personal tech our "security" agencies will exploit to spy on civilians with.