10 comments

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  TerenceEden

  1 year ago

  Why pay for WiFi? Share your WiFi and use other people's for free. Get a FON!
  http://www.fon.com/en - go on, they're only €15.
  
  I've got one and, while it's doesn't yet have the coverage of some providers, the more people who share their WiFi, the better.
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  Ewan

  1 year ago

  I've got one... but I have not once seen another FON that I could use?
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  James Whatley

  1 year ago

  I have the VF dongle and can vouch for this - I'm not entirely sure how I lived without it...
  
  
  ..actually - that's a lie. I used to use my phone as a modem. At least this way things are easier.
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• 

  jhucker99

  1 year ago

  Worst of all are hotels that still charge for wireless internet - it's like charging for the bath water. Wireless internet for a medium sized hotel probably costs a couple of hundred quid to set up and £50 pm.
  
  Definately Vodafone dongle thingummyjigs are the way to go - never ever pay for hotel internet access
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• 

  TerenceEden

  1 year ago

  As well as dongles, many laptops now come with built in HSDPA cards. Of course, it does mean that when 4G comes along you'll either need to get a new laptop or an external dongle.
  
  I use a Dell D430 and the performance from the internal card is great. Only possible downside is that you need to remove the laptop's battery before you can change the SIM card.
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  Mike Puchol

  1 year ago

  On one side, 3G is not working as well as it should - try using it indoors, or in crowded areas. HSDPA delivers a -maximum- 3.6Mbps split among all the users of a cell, so you're only going to get a small piece of that if many people start using it. Besides, latency makes it almost unusable for various things such as VoIP.
  
  Now the shameless plug (I'm the CTO): You can use Whisher to share your WiFi without having to pay €15 for a new box. Why add another WiFi signal that you don't need when you can share your existing one?
  
  Also, Whisher gives you per-minute access on over 60k commercial hotspots (for example BT OpenZone), so if you don't use it, you don't pay. If you use two minutes, you pay two minutes - no minimum session times, or monthly fees. As a launch promotion we're giving away €20 of free WiFi Out credit for people to try the service.
  
  http://www.whisher.com/freewifi - just visit this link, create your account and install the plugin to start using Whisher.
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  Ben Smith

  1 year ago

  Mike, this looks really cool but I'd love to be able to read some technical detail on how the WiFi sharing works to satisfy myself about the security / suitability of the solution for me. Couldn't find any of that detail on the site...?
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  Mike Puchol

  1 year ago

  Ben,
  
  We don't have any information yet as we are trying to keep things simple for the majority of people, but I'm working on a technical section for those interested in knowing what goes on under the hood. The gist of it is that we are transparently and securely sharing the encryption keys of the shared WiFi signals. When you share your WiFi, we redistribute your encryption key to the other Whisher clients, which in turn store it encrypted for use when needed. Thus, the client applies the key, and your visitors never even see it.
  
  If you want to temporarily stop sharing (for example you want all your bandwidth to download a heavy file) you can enable private mode either from the plugin, or from the My Account section on our website. This will kick out all the visitors that may currently be connected. In previous versions we had a third mode which was 'Buddies only', in which you decided with whom you shared your WiFi in a buddy-list style, and we will bring this back once we are confident users understand how the system works.
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  Ben Smith

  1 year ago

  Mike,
  
  Thanks for that - even something at that level would be useful to understand on the site.
  
  Does the client take any steps to control visitors to a network (access to other hosts on the network / bandwidth throttling / content filtering / logging etc) or is it pure key-sharing?
  
  Ben
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• 

  Anthony

  1 year ago

  I came to near enough the same conclusion at the end of March: http://freshplastic.vox.com/library/post/nightm...
  
  WiFi hotspots are a mess. Sure it's nice when you get faster than 3.5G speeds and don't have to worry about a fair use limit, but the whole (often unsuccessful) process involved isn't worth it when it's free and certainly isn't when you have to pay!
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