Archive for the Technology category
Starting Australia Day (January 26), myKP will introduce itself as a new ISP, promising broadband without caps. Their Hero Platform plan is $80 per month and the full product details, and small print, will be released on Australia Day. The access will be offered initially on a limited basis to myKP Free Wi-Fi Community residents spread across a number of councils (mostly NSW).
Additionally, good to see that soon they’ll introduce some more Sydney CBD (Pitt Street) and Haymarket free hotspots.
iiNet has teamed up with Starbucks to provide WiFi services to 20 Starbucks stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Check out the full list of stores, for Sydney it’s Hyde Park, Cockle Bay, Haymarket, Circular Quay, 525 George Street, Transport House and QVB. As an iiNet customer, you’ll receive 100Mb of free data to use per month in Starbucks WiFi hotspots. Keep your iiNet username and password handy.
McDonald’s has been offering $14/h Telstra WiFi with their burgers since 2003, allowing customers to work online (yeah right) or surf the Web while munching on their $6 burger and fries. Did anyone actually do that? Because, well, I know myself, and eating a greasy burger with sauce and greasy fries,… But at least they were ahead of their times compared to their competitors.
“There is a McDonald’s restaurant in virtually every community and by making this service available to so many we are taking a leadership position and anticipating the future communication needs our customers.”
Now they take the next big leap, and offer free WiFi at all their locations. That’s at 720 McDonald’s stores across Australia (roll-out over time). And at the same time they’ll make it ‘Family Friendly’ by using Clean Pipes technology from earthwave:
“Clean Pipes provides a common security framework to protect McDonald’s from both external and internal threats. The solution involved a multi-million dollar investment by earthwave to develop a defense in depth security architecture made up of layers of security including firewalls, network intrusion prevention systems, distributed denial of service protection and various web protection mechanisms. This architectural approach will enable McDonald’s ability to continually monitor and defend its networks against potential internet related attacks.”
“The ‘Clean Pipes’ service also provides McDonald’s with a number of proactive measures and reporting aimed at both highlighting and countering potential network security threats from internet traffic generated by customers using the McDonald’s free WiFi Hotspots.”
Sure sounds impressive, using all the security buzzwords. Why would you need all that to offer ‘Family Friendly’ free WiFi? As far as I can tell, that means their public WiFi is linked to their internal network?
Next, they’ll get bouncers at the door too…
Better be safe than sorry, I guess.
Almost twenty years on, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, creates the World Wide Web Foundation, the Web as humanity connected by technology:
The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.
The mission of the Foundation is:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
In a world where Net neutrality is under threat, and the intertubes are being censored, this is a welcome initiative. I believe Free Australia Wireless fits perfectly in the Web Foundation’s “Web for Society” and “Friends of the Web” programs.
Read the Web Foundation’s concept paper.
Meraki posted some interesting metric tidbits on its product blog last week:
In the course of building Free the Net in San Francisco, we came across some compelling metrics. Since its birth about a year ago, nearly 150,000 wireless devices have used the network. The percentage of those devices made up by iPhones has grown from 6% to 20% in just the past five months.
San Francisco, or California for that matter, isn’t indicative for iPhone usage around the world (with Apple and Silicon Valley around the corner). But it is an obvious trend that more and more devices have integrated Wifi, mobile broadband is still too slow and too expensive, and people want to connect, preferably free. Free, ubiquitous wireless internet, municipal or community driven, offers opportunity for social interaction, information gathering and innovative services we don’t know of yet. The iPhone hype, and any other Bold move by Blackberry, may well be the driving force for more free wireless Internet (one can hope and dream), even in Sydney.
Meraki will be developing a separate iPhone splash screen which Meraki users will be able to set up and customize soon.
While we’re still waiting for 802.11n to be approved, but we’re happily using it (with some consequences that devices don’t interoperate), the IEEE has ratified the 802.11r Wifi roaming standard, aka Fast Basic Service Set Transition. A pretty significant standard actually, especially with municipal/community Wifi in mind, covering large areas.
802.11r is a standard that lets Wifi devices roam quickly between access points, in less than 50ms, quick enough to keep a voice call alive. This much improves VoIP over Wifi and mobile browsing with minimal disruptions caused by changing access points and channels. Current roaming delays in 802.11 networks average in the hundreds of milliseconds, up to several seconds, as these 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind. While some have proclaimed 802.11 a/b/g/n… to be near-dead in favour of 3G mobile broadband or WIMax, this 802.11r standard proves it’s still alive and kicking.
Read on at DailyWireless.