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The Rise of Free Urban Internet (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the rising-pattern dept.

Intersection, the Alphabet-backed smart cities startup known for creating free internet kiosks for cities, is pushing to make free internet accessible in as many major cities as possible across the globe. From a report: As more aspects of our daily lives -- from healthcare to communication to travel -- become dependent on internet-connected devices, the concept of providing internet as a public good is becoming more widespread. Intersection is best known for its successful transformation of NYC's 7,500 pay-phones into free internet kiosks that act as hot-spots and advertising space. It's also spreading its programs to cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and even London. The program is entirely funded by advertising that the company sells on LinkNYC internet kiosks, so less densely-populated cities may be a tougher sell.

35 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. “The Public Good” by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    Sure, and the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized... right?

    Give me a break. At least be honest about your motivation.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:“The Public Good” by gnick · · Score: 4, Interesting

      the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    2. Re:“The Public Good” by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Beware of billionaires bearing "free" gifts.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:“The Public Good” by kelemvor4 · · Score: 1

      the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      Uh-huh.. because VPN ISP's would never "monetize" your information or your bandwidth, right?

    4. Re: “The Public Good” by reanjr · · Score: 1

      Encryption much?

    5. Re:“The Public Good” by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      LOL no, you can't trust your VPN either.
      At current, you can't trust the Internet at all. Regardless of how you're connecting to it, always assume at all times that you're being monitored, all traffic logged, analyzed, sniffed at, and scrutinized, for one purpose or another, and that you're constantly under either direct (as in from live hackers) or indirect (as in from a 'bot or bot-net or hacked website) attack. Think of it this way: The Internet may or may not have AIDS, so you're taking a risk consorting with it.

    6. Re:“The Public Good” by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      Actually, since we're on Slashdot and all, the instruction should be:
      Install your own VPN server and use that on all public networks. It's not that hard.
      - https://openvpn.net/index.php/...
      - https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/h...
      - https://play.google.com/store/...

    7. Re: “The Public Good” by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

      So you route your own traffic through your own internet service? Isn't that redundant?

  2. It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

    1. Re:It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

      Going to the movies is not free because they charge admission. And don't even get me started about the price of popcorn.

    2. Re:It's no free by drnb · · Score: 1

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

      The park visitors aren't identified and their habits put into a database.

  3. No beatings for disabling the telescreen by forkfail · · Score: 1

    We're all more than happy - falling over ourselves, really - to put those wires on ourselves and train MAC III right up.

    --
    Check your premises.
    1. Re:No beatings for disabling the telescreen by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Fiction is generally bad a doing a forecast of reality, and that one sounds less likely than most. Even BladeRunner sounds more likely.

      Please note: The dystopian stories are usually even worse at forecasting than the utopian ones. You can point at pieces of 1984 or Brave New World that are mirrored in the current world, but you can also pick out pieces of various utopian ones. At the current point in time the dystopian predictions seem the most accurate, but in much of the past it's been the utopian ones. (Though not the parts that predict essential changes in human nature.)

      OTOH, if one of the really dystopian predictions ever does become actualized, then there won't be any way back.

      P.S.: Do you consider "Oath of Fealty" a Utopian novel or a Dystopian one?

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re:No beatings for disabling the telescreen by forkfail · · Score: 1

      Sea of Glass was better than the Wikipedia article might have indicated. It read well, and the idea of predictive analytics at scale was very well done.

      Your millage may vary.

      PS: At one time, I considered Oath of Fealty Utopian. Not so much anymore.

      --
      Check your premises.
  4. An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 2

    ...for a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure. For instance, how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)? Infrastructure is just about deployed enough that a slow, strange, ad-hoc hack-job internet could be built without any telcos or government whatsoever.

    1. Re:An interesting experiement... by olsmeister · · Score: 1

      How long until such a system gets hacked or abused? How would you troubleshoot problems? Do you want your WiFi continuously saturated with traffic passing through from God-knows-where?

    2. Re:An interesting experiement... by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Sounds complicated and unreliable, when 4G already works like a charm.

    3. Re:An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 1

      4G does work like a charm; considerably better than an ad-hoc internet over consumer wifi WAP's. But the notion of an internet that doesn't depend on any corporate or sovereign gatekeepers is intriguing.

    4. Re:An interesting experiement... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Go ahead and do it. I have heard about this pipe dream for so long I fail to understand why it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because it doesn't scale up?

      There are two main problems. One, you have to convince people to serve as repeaters for others, and cooperation is not something most of us are taught. Only jocks get taught the value of cooperation in school, but they're taught to only cooperate with a handful of people who wear the same costume. Two, it's much harder to profit from, so there's no corporate interest. Corporations and other bureaucracies like small numbers of points of control so that they can keep that control.

      There are numerous mesh network projects, and many of them can be used for real purposes, like bot swarms. But getting nationwide coverage is going to be a long, long time coming.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:An interesting experiement... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      I think you're talking about a mesh network. They don't scale well, and with increased size the number of necessary hops climbs. Mesh networks work well on a small scale, but with increasing users they work less well even if you don't distribute them geographically. When you start adding in geographic distribution, I would expect the lag to be worse than O(n^2) where n is the number of concurrent users.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    6. Re:An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 1

      Yeah, it would be latency-palooza for such a homwbrewed internet. It would also be slow. It would not be optimal. Fortnight would suck on it. I get all that. What is interesting to me though is this notion of an actual 'underground internet' that is independent of any telco provider, or government sanction. Such a thing would be a godsend for citizens of places like Iran or Venezuela; and would drive their security services bonkers - and not because of the latency time.

    7. Re:An interesting experiement... by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      Multi-hop Mobil ad-hoc networks. Like BATMAN or Netsukuku.

      a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure

      That's not the definition of open-source, but I get what you're saying. I think you mean "indie" or distributed.

      how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?

      Assuming everyone all ran the same friendly software on their cell phones and wifi routers, you could get to the edge of town. You would be stopped once you hit a rural environment. In NYC, that would include Jersey, but not Florida.

      And yeah, it's slow and laggy with minimal throughput. But it's pretty awesome in a pinch. But of course not everyone would play along. MANETS aren't really a replacement for Internet infrastructure, but they're really interesting for that last-mile. If you have enough people that let neighbors mooch off your land-line or cell service, I think it'd be a viable.

  5. Re:Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

    The internet use to be voluntary interconnection of private business and educational circuits. The internet was free.

    This is false nostalgia. The Internet was never free. In its early days it was very expensive, and there were severe restrictions on who could connect and what sort of information could be transmitted.

    They killed it long ago when ISPs roes

    The ISPs dramatically reduced the cost, gave access to normal people, and obviated the NSF content restrictions.

  6. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by Desler · · Score: 2

    You’re posting that ironically, right? Babylon Bee is a satire site...

  7. Re: Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by reanjr · · Score: 1

    Maybe during the Arpanet days, but since the web was introduced, ISP plans have generally hovered around the $10-40 range. Not all that expensive.

  8. "Free" as in "Beer" by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1
    Or, if you prefer, "Free" as in "Lunch", as in "no such thing, as.."

    Monetization, monetization everywhere!

    ..of course, is anyone really finding this to be a revelation? xD

    1. Re:"Free" as in "Beer" by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You're either mistaken or English isn't your primary language and you're confused; it's your mom that brings me beer for my lunch. xD

  9. Except it's not by DaMattster · · Score: 1

    Your data is being harvested and sold so you've got no expectation of any kind of privacy. There is nothing free or altruistic about these urban internet offerings.

  10. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by HiThere · · Score: 1

    It *is* a problem. I really think the internet should be a public utility managed at the local level, but most towns don't have the expertise to put up a good one. I'm really not sure that Google is a good alternative, but if you think of them as an alternative to AT&T or Verison, well, they don't look that bad.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  11. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by OYAHHH · · Score: 1

    > but most towns don't have the expertise to put up a good one. I'm really not sure that Google is a good alternative

    I've seen in Mountain View what Google calls their public internet provided by them. It isn't pretty. In fact it is terrible.

    Not a fan of ATT or Verizon, but at least they have a profit motive to actually provide something that at least works somewhat.. Versus a non-working Google setup.

    --
    Caution: Contents under pressure
  12. LinkNYC by fafalone · · Score: 1

    You mean the new homeless porn access program? Now that's service, bringing porn right to them in the middle of the street.

  13. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

    I thought ATT and Version were better because they sell us a product instead of making us the product?

    At least that's what I read allot on Slashdot.

    I don't mind being a product and getting free stuff as long as I am aware of it first :)

  14. We can go back to text emails by drnb · · Score: 1

    Ever try using Tor? Now multiply the slowness that is Tor times 1,000. You'd be lucky to get 300 baud.

    Good, we can go back to text emails. That would solve a few problems.

  15. "Don't know much about geography..." by westlake · · Score: 1

    Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?

    Toronto is north of here over about 30 miles of open water. The Niagara escarpment to the south makes bridging to the backbone near Buffalo something of a problem. Building out a network of any size is difficult and and MESH isn't magic.

  16. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by HiThere · · Score: 1

    What grounds do you have for believing that they don't make their customers a product as well as demanding that they get paid.

    As I said, I feel the internet should be a local utility. I'm just skeptical that the local jurisdictions will have the skills and commitment to actually run it. In that case there would be an internet bill just like there is a water bill or a garbage collection bill.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.