

China is Changing Public Telephone Booths into Wifi Hotspots - brennannovak
http://www.mobinode.com/2010/12/17/china-is-changing-public-telephone-booths-into-wifi-hotspot/

======
emeltzer
recently many places that used to be open wifi hotspots have become "china
mobile hotspots" which are about one million times less useful.

example: starbucks in Beijing used to just be a WEP'd wireless connection, you
buy a cup of coffee and they give you the password, allowing you to go online
for as long as you want. Now, you go online and are redirected to a
horrifically buggy interface that requires you to input a China Mobile cell #,
at which pt they will send you the login information as a text msg to your
phone. All sorts of whack limitations (4hrs max, if you get d/c'd you can only
log back on 3x and you get dc'd frequently...)

It seems to me that this is very likely a decree from the govt, since wifi
access tied to phone #'s is much less worrisome to them than anonymous wifi.
could just be a money grab by china mobile though. in any case, I would
imagine that these municipal spots will also use the phone # verification
system, which totally undermines their usefulness.

------
tewks
BT did this a while ago, starting around 2003.

I'm not sure how heavily used they are, though I'd suspect not tremendously.

~~~
bensummers
Lots of smartphone mobile contracts come with free wifi on the big hotspot
providers like BT Openzone. I suspect most of their use is phones
automatically hopping on to them when their users are walking down busy
streets. I doubt they'd still be active if no one used them.

------
ximeng
Hong Kong now has free wifi in many government buildings and spaces, including
libraries and public parks. So you can sit in a park and connect to the
internet fast and for free.

<http://www.gov.hk/en/theme/wifi/program/>

------
elblanco
This is far too forward looking to ever happen in the U.S.

~~~
code_duck
What if a threat to public safety such as a terrorist or drug dealer was to
use this service??

~~~
zachrose
How's that any different from a library?

~~~
code_duck
Don't ask me, I was being sarcastic. If I was to continue with that mode, I'd
say "We need to close those too, what if a terrorist learned how to operate a
screwdriver from a public book??".

------
gommm
"Secondarily, Chinese 3G services (no matter provided by China Mobile, China
Unicom or China Telecom) are still slow and patchy. "

I'm actually impressed by how well 3G works in Shanghai and Suzhou.... I'm
using China Telecom and haven't had any problem

------
treeface
Cool, I suppose. However, it doesn't really seem to matter that the wifi
hotspot used to be / still is a telephone booth. They could've put the router
on anything and achieved the same effect.

~~~
Timothee
It doesn't matter for the users at all, of course. But I'd think that phone
booths have a few benefits that makes this a good idea.

For one thing, there's a phone connection right there. I imagine that they
would plug into this for the hotspot.

Plus, they don't have to figure out where to put the hotspots: just use the
booths, period. It would probably make the deployment simpler and faster.

Also, the overall coverage will most likely not be perfect, so the booths are
a visible structure to get close to if your signal is weak (as opposed to try
to spot a standalone router for example).

------
michaelelliot
This is a great idea and could really compliment 3G networks.

