Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sure, millions of hotspots, each with ac wifi and a 28k upstream connection. You can connect really quickly ... with the other three people using the hotspot.
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.
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.
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.
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.