WeFi Blog

Tired of paying high prices for Wi-Fi at Europe’s train stations when all you want to do is check your email and look up an address on a Google map for 15 minutes? St. Pancras, the Eurostar hub in London, is doing things differently. It is offering what visitors want: free Wi-Fi. Unlike other European stations that have mistakenly signed up with the local telecom incumbent (usually a bad sign because it means sky-high Wi-Fi prices), St. Pancras has teamed up with Cityspace UK to provide Wi-Fi access throughout the station.

Read more on Muniwireless.

I love Facebook. It knows so many things about me, things I never told anyone… Well, if you can’t beat them, join them. So I got a new Nokia N95 with Wi-Fi, armed it with the WeFi software, and started to use my Facebook account on the go. Soon, this became very addictive and I installed Fring, Gmail and Google Maps, and got used to the web browsing interface, and all for free via Wi-Fi. Then I made the mistake which I’m sure was made by anyone who ever tried to view Youtube on Nokia. I navigated to the Youtube site and played an interesting movie called “Bristlebot” about home-maid toothbrush robots that move really fast…  After a few seconds of watching (the movie was really interesting so it took me a while to notice), I was wondering why the movie was so slow, and then I noticed I was watching the whole movie over 3G, not Wi-Fi!!! There goes the free part…

I investigated a little and this is what I came up with. The browsing and searching of Youtube are done through the basic device browser and when activated, you will be prompted to select the method of connection (Wi-Fi, 3G, etc…). But the movie part is actually played with RealPlayer which is a separate media playing app that is automatically configured to use 3G as its preferred connection. Now, I don’t know if this is on purpose, but you end up paying a lot of money…

To watch Youtube for free, all I had to do was to configure RealPlayer to use “Automatic WeFi” as its default connection You can find step-by-step instructions for doing this on our forum: http://www.wefi.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14#p19.

Delta Airlines will be offering Wi-Fi on all of its domestic flights in the United States by the end of the summer. However, they will be charging for it: $9.95 on flights 3 hours or less, $12.95 for longer flights. They are joining American Airlines and Virgin America, two other carriers that have decided to offer Wi-Fi.

I can see how Wi-Fi could become an extra source of revenue for US carriers. They are now charging for water, soda, coffee, extra bags, blankets and pillows. Soon they’ll charge you to use the toilets. Meanwhile, one can expect service to deteriorate even further. Maybe you can Twitter (or live video cam) your horrible airline experience using their Wi-Fi service.

I was recently at the Pacific Palms Resort in Los Angeles, a fabulous golf/conference/spa hotel that has just undergone a $60 million renovation and aside from the excellent spa facilities and the wonderful staff, what made the stay remarkable was the Wi-Fi experience: free Wi-Fi and no convoluted login procedures.

Hoteliers are paying more attention to the quality of Wi-Fi service. What used to be an afterthought — a service used only by a few geeks — has become a potential “deal breaker”. If I had a choice between two similar hotels and one has free, fast Wi-Fi, I’ll go with the hotel with better Wi-Fi service. I am convinced that as more devices come with WI-Fi (some already have ONLY Wi-Fi such as the Mac Book Air), hoteliers must upgrade their wireless networks.

The Manchester City Council has decided to extend the Eastserve wireless broadband network throughout the city. At present, it is only in East Manchester. Because of the success of Eastserve, the city is now looking for a partner to help it deploy the network and associated services to other neighborhoods. Eastserve was launched in 2000 as program to “bridge the digital divide”.

To find out more about the Manchester municipal wireless broadband project and the public tender, go to Muniwireless.com.

Arezzo, a beautiful historic town in Tuscany, is deploying several FON access points throughout the municipality, to deliver Wi-Fi connectivity to residents and visitors. Foneros can always get access for free, but if you are not a Fonero you can either watch a 15-second ad (to get free access) or pay 3 EUR per day, a tiny sum compared to what most European hotels are charging for Wi-Fi.

Mobile operators in Europe are breathing a sigh of relief after Fabio Colasanti, EC director general for information society and media, said that caps on data roaming charges were not the best way to ensure that EU mobile phone users avoid that end-of-the-month surprise: massive roaming charges. Colasanti says that the operators should tell their customers how much data they have already “consumed”.  What people really want is to be able to see just how much their mobile phone bill happens to be in real time. But the operators make so much money from customers NOT KNOWING in real time what they have already used.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile, which has lobbied heavily against data roaming caps, says that people should just use Wi-Fi. Not surprising since T-Mobile has a global Wi-Fi hotspot service.

ABI Research estimates that the number of Wi-Fi hotspots around the world will grow by 40% (2008 over 2007). Europe is leading the rest of the world in the number of hotspots being deployed, with the UK, France, Germany and Russia at the lead. ABI also says that hotspots are moving towards a “free” model: “Charging for service is counter-productive in the long run because the real money will be in value-add content downloads. In the near future hotspots are likely to encourage users to pay to download the latest music and TV shows. Airport clubs are likely to offer hotspot users the chance to download movies for their upcoming trips. Starbucks has already begun selling music CDs in its stores. The next logical step will be to move to selling music downloads.”

I disagree with some of ABI’s conclusions. Click here to read why.

Hong Kong is rolling out free Wi-Fi service in and around government buildings, sports centers and public parks. By 2009, over 350 buildings will have free Wi-Fi. The project, called GovWiFi, is designed to serve both visitors and residents. Hong Kong is working with PCCW and Aruba Networks to deliver the service.

Go to: http://www.gov.hk/en/theme/wifi/program/index.htm

Thanks to enthusiastic user-demand, we are proud to release WeFi (Beta) for Nokia S60 phones. The software allows intuitive usage of WiFi by automatically connecting and verifying internet availability. All you need to do is select “Automatic – WeFi” when running an application that requires internet connection (browser, Youtube, real-player, etc…), sit back, and WeFi will select for you an active connection. You can also set “Automatic – WeFi” as the default connection for any application.

In the near future, we will also include the powerful WeFi community engine that helps you find and select active connections quickly, based on rating and information collected previously by other users.
Of course, you can still store your own passwords and manually connect to specific spots.