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| Seven Wi-Fi questions answered |
July 6, 2006 |
Hotspots: They’re in small businesses, coffee shops and restaurants. They’re in hotel lobbies and office towers. They’re in airports and train stations—even on board railway cars.
Each month, more of these public wireless Internet access points pop up in cities and towns across Canada. They’re being deployed by telecom and wireless network operators, dedicated hotspot companies and individual businesses.
Increasingly, municipalities themselves are getting into the public wireless Internet access business. While it’s by no means the only example in Canada, Toronto is the one everyone’s watching. Toronto Hydro Telecom, a subsidiary of the city’s electric utility, announced in March its intent to deploy a high-speed wireless service. By year end, this network will serve the city’s downtown. It will then expand over the next three years to deploy blanket wireless coverage across the metropolis. When fully deployed, the network will cover more than 600 square kilometers and be available to more than 2.5 million Toronto residents.
Whether it’s a single, free-for-the-taking hotspot run by the local coffee shop or a full-service metropolitan area network covering Canada’s largest city, it’s increasingly likely that road warriors and others on the go can find a wireless connection wherever they are. It’s also increasingly likely that Canadians have questions and concerns about hotspots. Here are some of the answers.
What equipment do I need?
The answer depends on the type of hotspot. First, you need a device fitted with a Wi-Fi radio. It can be a laptop, a PDA or a wireless smartphone. The wireless component may be built in, as in the case of Wi-Fi-enabled phones or PDAs, or it may be an internal or external Wi-Fi access card the user installs.
Many hotspots are free, but for managed sites — those that require user authentication and, most likely, a fee for the service — you also need an account with the hotspot provider. If that’s the case, you’ll be hit with a screen asking for money as soon as you launch your browser. Some access points — such as those run by Canada’s three big wireless companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) and by providers such as FatPort — will let users create accounts on the spot using a telephone number or credit card. And in many cases, an account created with one company can be used to buy service from hotspots run by other operators.
How do I find hotspots?
If there’s a hotspot within range, a Wi-Fi-enabled device will typically find it automatically. The challenge comes in knowing if Wi-Fi service is available in a given location before you go there. For this information, start with the Internet. Googling “Hotspot Canada” (without the quotes) will return more than six million hits, including dozens of Web sites that list hotspot locations.
Bell, Rogers and Telus have connected their hotspots to create a network of more than 1,000 wireless access points across the country. The companies publish a list of these locations at www.canadianhotspot.ca.
San Francisco-based JiWire lists more than 1,400 hotspots in Canada at www.jiwire.com. This is part of a global listing of more than 114,000 hotspots in 126 countries. JiWire’s directory includes information about the service provider, the cost to use the access point, and a link to get driving directions to the location.
What about security?
Nothing on the Internet is entirely secure. Before you begin, ensure your equipment is as bulletproof as it can be. “If you’re exposing yourself, whether it’s your laptop, your cellphone or your PDA, you need to have some kind of security software protecting your device because when you’re joining a typical hotspot you are visible to other people on the network,” said Brian Hernacki, security researcher at Symantec in Redwood City, Calif.
So, at least for notebooks, don’t go out in the Wi-Fi wilds without good firewall and antivirus software.
Dave Dobbin, president of Toronto Hydro Telecom, agreed and suggested stronger protection if important information is being transmitted. “If users are sending sensitive corporate data over a network I would strongly recommend they use some sort of data encryption software—a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or something like that,” he said. “But I’d make that same recommendation with DSL or cable modems, too.”
Brian Sharwood of Toronto-based telecom consulting firm SeaBoard Group said laptop users should have a firewall running. “A lot of computers have internal firewalls on them so other people can’t see into the files on the computer. These are just basic security measures that everybody should use.”
There’s also a problem known as an “evil twin” — a wireless access point that looks like a legitimate hotspot but is run by someone trying to collect information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. Hernacki at Symantec said users need to ensure they’re joining the right hotspot. Begin by making sure the network name on your screen matches the network that the site is operating. “If you’re at a Starbucks, go over and ask the person at the café counter what the name of the network is, and if you’re using a municipal Wi-Fi service, you should know how to identify an access point that’s part of that network,” he said.
So, can I do online banking?
The security of information travelling over the Internet depends on encryption and other technologies, and in general what works on a wired connection works on a Wi-Fi one, too. “There are means of securing the communication through this kind of media, and it’s being done today,” said Boris Khmelnitsky, national principal for Wireless and Mobile, Information Technology Services for the Americas at IBM Canada in Toronto. “A lot of people use wireless today to do their banking, but it has to be done properly: the network has to use proper encryption and authentication.”
Data transmissions sent over unencrypted links open the user to various risks, Hernacki said, including sniffing. You’ve been sniffed when an outsider spies on your Internet traffic.
“Anybody else with a laptop who is in range can see what’s being sent. If you’re sitting in a coffee shop and you send across a credit card number, and it’s not an encrypted connection, and if the guy two doors down is sniffing the network, he can write down your credit card number and go on to commit various types of fraud,” he said.
“If you understand enough to know that you are on a truly secure, encrypted connection, it may be okay. But when in doubt, don’t do it.”
That means no online banking at a coffee shop, unless you know the owner is running an encrypted signal. However, as Sharwood pointed out, tech issues are only one element here. “The bigger issue is social hacking: people looking over your shoulder.”
Can I ditch my broadband?
When the large-scale Wi-Fi network was announced in Toronto, one of the first questions asked was, do people still need to pay Bell or Rogers for Internet access? The answer depends on the user’s needs and the hotspot’s ability to satisfy them. Issues to consider include the user’s proximity to the access point, as well as connection speed, security, cost and quality of service.
While traditional hotspots may come up short as replacements for home broadband services, city-wide networks may be up to the task. “Barring the usual interference problems of metal in walls, big concrete blocks, that sort of thing, then theoretically you could use a city’s wireless infrastructure instead of having to set up your own,” said Doug Cooper, country manager for Intel Canada. “You would pay for that service, but you’re paying for the service either way.”
Certainly, Dobbin at Toronto Hydro Telecom expects his network will be a viable alternative: the company is installing routers on top of street lights, and feeding them with a 100-megabit-per-second fibre optic-based Internet connection. “I can only speculate on what the average user will do, but [replacing their home broadband service] sounds pretty cool to me,” he said. “It’s a lot of bandwidth, so users will see much higher speeds and more users will be able to use the network, and we have the ability to do quality of service prioritization at the node. That means if, for example, you’re using a Wi-Fi phone, the unit will prioritize your voice packets over regular data packets to make sure your voice call gets through.”
Sharwood is confident Toronto Hydro Telecom is deploying with an eye to the residential broadband market, among others. “They’re thinking about small business replacement lines, and I think we’ll also see some alternate uses for it, such as Wi-Fi equipped BlackBerrys or PDAs, and even phone service over the Wi-Fi connection (using Voice over IP).”
Why are cities doing Wi-Fi?
It may seem odd cities are setting up Wi-Fi networks when so many businesses are already deploying hotspots. But Cooper points out that making wireless Internet access universally available to residents and visitors is only one reason cities are interested. “Over the years as the Internet was built out, a lot of cities invested in planting dark fibre,” he said, meaning fibre optic cables installed in case they were needed in the future. With the addition of Wi-Fi nodes, he said, “that dark fibre is now turning into gold for them because they’re realizing that, with technologies like Voice over IP, they can run a lot of their telecommunications traffic on a wholly owned network where their only cost is maintenance. Their per-transaction cost, or their per-minute cost, goes down dramatically.”
Cooper said some communities are looking to Wi-Fi as a means to stimulate economic development, while others want to leverage the advantages of increased telecommuting. “Cities have actually provided a stimulus for business that’s done where you are, as opposed to having to go to a bricks-and-mortar location,” he said. “That saves energy costs because you’re not in a commute and it saves commute time, which is generally wasted time, so there’s a real advantage to it that small businesses and communities are starting to realize.”
Municipal Wi-Fi also changes the appeal of wireless Internet access for visitors to the city, Sharwood said. “Right now they might need to pay for a connection at their hotel, and another one at a conference centre, and another one at a restaurant. This way, they may be able to get a single connection, and do it all using the same account.”
Will Wi-Fi create new business?
The short answer is yes.
Dobbin said he’s spoken with companies using Wi-Fi for everything from tracking people and assets, to managing fleets of vehicles, to connecting parking meters so they can authorize credit card transactions. “The mother of all applications is voice,” he said, “and we actually have, in the lab, Wi-Fi phones that connect back to our Voice over IP server. This phone mimics my desk phone so that if you ring my number, they both ring and if I’m in the wireless zone and pick up my Wi-Fi phone, that’s where the call goes—with no airtime charges.”
Sharwood said savings can be realized for data transactions too. “[Existing] wireless networks are relatively expensive, whereas this will be a much lower-priced product. Equipping a group of couriers that run around downtown with a PDA and a Wi-Fi connection is much cheaper than having them use a device where they pay for each e-mail that comes in,” he said.
In addition, Cooper said, the antennas on streetlights makes a city-wide wireless network an excellent platform on which to run location-based services. “Suppose you want to open up your own service that was location-based, but you didn’t want to go out and put a wireless access point in every coffee shop,” he said.
“With a grid of access points within a few hundred metres you can pinpoint locations.”
Dobbin does not, however, expect city-wide networks to spell the death of cellular services. “Some customers are going to need to stay with a cellular network: they travel a lot, or they’re outside [the coverage area],” he said. “And the cellular network will serve them well. But for those users who are in Toronto — who live, work and play in Toronto—this is beautiful.”
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