Hotspot (Wi-Fi)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hotspots are venues that offer Wi-Fi access. The public can use their laptop, PDA, or Dual-mode phone to access the Internet. Of the estimated 150 million laptops, 14 million PDAs, and other emerging Wi-Fi devices sold per year for the last few years, most include the Wi-Fi feature.
For venues that have broadband service, offering wireless access is as simple as purchasing one AP and connecting the AP with the gateway box. Hotspots are often found at restaurants, train stations, airports, libraries, coffee shops, bookstores, and other public places. Many universities and schools have wireless networks in their campus.
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[edit] Brief History of Hotspots
WiFi hotspots were first proposed by Brett Stewart at the NetWorld/InterOp conference in the San Francisco Moscone Center in August of 1993. Stewart did not use the term 'hotspot' but referred to public accessible wireless LANs. Stewart went on to found the companies PLANCOM in 1994 (for Public LAN Communications, which became MobileStar and then the hotspot arm of T-Mobile) and subsequently Wayport in 1996.
The term 'HotSpot' may have first been advanced by Nokia about five years after Stewart first proposed the concept.
During the dotcom boom and subsequent bust in the year 2000, dozens of companies had the notion that Wi-Fi could become the payphone for broadband. On June 24, 2004, Ed Sutherland from Wi-Fi Planet reports, "Hotspots are Dead -- Long Live Hotspots."
The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots. Although some companies like T-mobile and Boingo have had some success with charging for access, over 90% of the over 300,000 hotspots offer free service to entice customers to their venue.
Free hotspots continue to grow. Wireless networks that cover entire cities, such as Municipal broadband have mushroomed. MuniWireless reports that over 300 metropolitan projects have been started.
Many business models have emerged for hotspots. The final structure of the hotspot marketplace will ulitimately have to consider the intellectual property rights of the early movers; portfolios of more than 1000 allowed and pending patent claims are held by some of these parties.
[edit] Commercial Hotspots
A commercial hotspot may feature:
- A captive portal that users are redirected to for authentication and payment
- A payment option using credit card, Paypal, iPass, or other payment service
- A walled garden feature that allows free access to certain sites
Many services, such as Boingo, SurfAndSip, Nomadix, and NetnearU provide these payment services to hotspot providers, for a monthly fee. ZoneCD is a GNU/Linux LiveCD that provides payment services for hotspots who wish to deploy their own service.
Major airports and business hotels are more likely to charge for service. Most hotels provide free service to guests; and increasingly small airports and airline lounges offer free service.
FON is a Spanish portal that shares wireless broadband among members and sells excess bandwidth to what they call Aliens. The latter feature breaks broadband agreements that most members have with their broadband provider. Thus, commercial hotspots cannot join the FON community.
[edit] Free Wi-Fi hotspots
Free hotspots have mushroomed. So have sites that list these free services.
- WiFi FREESPOT[1] - Provides most of free Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide.
- AnchorFree[2] - Free hotspots in some countries.
- FREESPOT[3] - Free hotspots in Japan.
[edit] Ad Supported Hotspots
- free-hotspot.com is in 14 Countries in Europe.
- Google WiFi,
- MetroFi
[edit] Dual-mode Hotspots
Extending cellular indoors...
- T-Mobile Hotspots
- BT UMA effort
[edit] Hotspot Security Concerns
Most hotspots are unsecured. User data is shared as naked text as all users.
Some hotspots authenticate users. This does not secure the data transmission or prevent packet sniffers from allowing people to see traffic on the network.
Some venues offer VPN as an option, such as Google WiFi. This solution is expensive to scale.
Others such as T-mobile provide a download option that deploys WPA support specific to T-mobile. This conflicts with enterprise configurations at Cisco, IBM, HP, Google, and other large enterprises who have solutions specific to their internal WLAN.
Another company, AeONsafe, has a mixed mode 802.11i WiFi for public venues. The security services requires venues to install equipment that includes the AeONsafe, embedded code. The company then provides users with a private key per device. The mixed mode supports Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Palm, and Mobile platforms without software downloads.
A "poisoned hotspot" refers to a free public hotspot set up by identity thieves or other malicious individuals for the purpose of "sniffing" the data sent by the user. This abuse can be avoided by the use of VPN or AeONsafe.
[edit] References
- Wi-Fi Planet: [4] - "Hotspots are Dead -- Long Live Hotspots."
- AeONsafe: [5] - Secured WiFi for public venues
- MuniWireless: [6] - List of municipal wireless projects
