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The implementation of free wifi over the air is currently being implemented in a third world country city called: Bangalore.
 
For most of my adult life, I've lived in congregate housing and I've always opened up my WiFi as a public service and never had problems. Yes, I know--I've been lucky.

Now that many routers are dual band, I am able to keep a secure network for myself and an open one for guests.

I do this for one reason--I deplore waste. No need for someone to spend $40/month for access when a neighbor has surplus capacity.

Yeah, but I've read about people abusing this. Basically the police show up saying that they have proof you've been looking at child porn and there is nothing you can do to prove otherwise. Yeah. That was enough to convince me!

I wonder if this is the reason ISP's are now putting caps on how much data you can use at home. I live in an area that only has Mediacom and Century Link. I can get 50down 5 up at Mediacom—but it's capped at 350GB. You have to go up to the expensive 100/10 just to get 999GB! I just have so many problems with this. First of all, I thought the reason mobile data was limited was because of nature of the technology—connecting to a single tower. Surely cable doesn't have such severely limiting restrictions? Maybe the restrictions are because people are now opening up their hotspots for free? Supply and demand. Prices have been going up too. Fun. And for those of you wondering who uses over 350GB—I have a Dropbox account that easily eats through at least half of that. The rest is Netflix/Hulu/YouTube, as well as uploads to YouTube (around 1GB each every day), software updates (Adobe CC ones can be pretty big and lots of app store game updates which can be big), download of Xbox One games (which can be anywhere from 15GB to 40GB), Rdio streaming (we have a daycare so that's going most of the day with children's music), iCloud shared stream of baby photos and videos with family, Adobe CC syncing of RAW files with my iPad, online gaming, and FTP use while building websites for clients. It's home internet, and I do a lot with it. I can't even imagine how much more use I'll need with iCloud Drive coming down the pipe. Hopefully not too much more if it replaces Dropbox for me but I might use it even more.
 
My neighbor had his WIFI open because he didn't know jack about IT. Some perv found this open wifi and would download and upload child porn.

Let's just say it took my neighbor over 1 year to clear his name. And the only reason he cleared it is because my security cameras caught the perv that would sit in his little car at at the curb.

I was just going to present the exact possibility, until I saw your post.

It's unfortunate that every time something is available for free, it gets abused, as in your neighbor's case. I can imagine the trouble he's been through during that year.

The other possibility is people massively downloading content and slowing down your internet connection.

People need to change before Steve's Vision could become a reality.
 
I was under the impression that you would be held legally liable if someone did something illegal using your network
 
The UK is very good for free wifi. The worst thing is having to sign up for some of he free networks or ask a barrista what the password is. When I go to Spain is takes a little more work to find free WIFI.
 
I like the idea. If people everywhere suddenly latched onto the idea of real community, it could happen. The chance of that happening in most westernised cities? About as likely as Apple providing free wi-fi to the city of Cupertino I'd say.

Well... unless you use America and Western as synonyms, you are wrong. This kind of projects have been active and growing in various european countries.
Give fon.com a look, for example. That's the ***** in southern european countries.

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The security issues cut both ways. How do you know that a Wifi hotspot with the SSID "xfinitywifi" is really run by Comcast? It could just as well be a bad guy fishing for Xfinity passwords. By using public hotspots, you also open yourself up to a variety of man-in-the-middle attacks.

If we're gonna get so paranoid, Wi-Fi shouldn't be even used.
At all.
 
I was under the impression that you would be held legally liable if someone did something illegal using your network

It's a real gray area, as far as I know. If the person doing it was caught, I'm sure you would be in the clear. But if all the authorities had was your IP address, you could be in for a world of trouble. And even if the criminal was caught, if they suspected that you knew about it and didn't stop it, you could be in trouble as well. In any case, you'd be at the mercy of a prosecutor whose only desire is to file more notches in his briefcase.
 
ISPs actively work to stop this sort of data sharing. They write bans against it into their user contracts. They put caps on the data usage. Phone companies are one form of ISP and they really don't want to see network sharing happen because it will cut into their ill gotten obscene profits.
 
We need the internet and the access points to be like a utility. There is probably a ton of profit that can be wrung out of our local cable companies and either returned to customers or put into upgraded service.

But until then and until I have easy access to better diagnostic tools, I won't open my Guest network to strangers. There are some weird folks who live in the house next to mine. Who knows what they would end up streaming and how much capacity they would use once they realized I had an open and free network. Not to mention that I pay for 30 Gb download speed and 5 GB up. So I've probably got the the fastest connection on the block.

Really? I'm genuinely curious :cool:
 
For most of my adult life, I've lived in congregate housing and I've always opened up my WiFi as a public service and never had problems. Yes, I know--I've been lucky.

Now that many routers are dual band, I am able to keep a secure network for myself and an open one for guests.

I do this for one reason--I deplore waste. No need for someone to spend $40/month for access when a neighbor has surplus capacity.

Same here. I have a separate Guest network available for the public. My house is the closest to the pool and I am happy to help out the fellow neighbors with some internet access.
 
Won't happen

You can make it secure. You could easily allow maximum "shared" bandwidth adjustable. It won't happen, because... Comcast and U-Verse and all the other IPs are frightened by the idea of free Internet. Next question.
 
When at a Sunnyvale Council meeting to discuss plans for the spaceship campus, council suggested Apple provide free wifi to the public. Mr. Jobs was having none of it.
 
This already exists in the UK

BT already do this in the UK. it means if you are near the house of another BT customer, you get free wifi, provided you have opened up your network to do the same. It's great.
 
Funny Americans.

So many people here raving about opening up their WiFi and freely sharing their internet with their neighbours, but if you were to call these same Americans "socialists" they would jump down your throats and rip you a new one.

"Sharing" services is socialism, period.
 
So many people here raving about opening up their WiFi and freely sharing their internet with their neighbours, but if you were to call these same Americans "socialists" they would jump down your throats and rip you a new one.

"Sharing" services is socialism, period.

It's not socialism if it's done voluntarily by private citizens or companies, which is what people are talking about.
 
In the UK this is already a reality for BT internet customers.

Here if you have BT broadband your router shares it's connection under a different SSID called BTWiFi, if you connect to it once you connect to all hotspots on any wifi device. You can auto connect to this on iOS etc but there is still sometimes a need to log into a web page to begin a session, though auto fill makes it a one click deal.

If you opt out of the service, you can't connect anymore so it's a great way to give something back for zero impact on your connection. I rarely find that i can't connect to a hotspot as there are few places that don't have a BT router nearby. In busy areas the routers are hammered but sometimes you can enjoy super fast net in the most difficult of places for mobile signals. It's not perfect but it's close.

Other free Wifi hotspots are slow and skim you for info. It would never work any other way. Public wifi from the likes of governments or google are dodgy and are skimming you for info and being used to track your device as you walk to provide metrics and sell data, the dark side of wifi hotspots is literally worse than NSA!
 
I love having a guest network, but I also have my guest network password protected. Works great when friends come over or if we have a party...they get internet access but no access to the Apple TV or other network connected hard drives. This also keeps random strangers on the street off my network.
 
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