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Time Warner Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Hotspots

Posted by Zonk on Tue Apr 24, 2007 08:23 AM
from the now-to-get-airports-to-agree dept.
The Internet Businesses Wireless Networking Hardware
Hotspots writes with a link to a BusinessWeek article discussing a new service that Time Warner Cable is offering to its customers. Flying in the face of most business decisions about Wi-Fi availability, Time Cable customers will soon be able to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots. This privilege comes as Time Warner inks a deal with the Spanish startup Fon, which is already operating a similar deal with ISPs in Europe. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available. Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running."
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  • They couldn't maintain a cable internet connection at my house much longer than 30 to 45 days before some contractor screwed up the line amplifiers in the neighborhood, or a squirrel gnawed through their cables. Then, after waiting twenty minutes on hold listening to sales pitches for their digital phone and security monitoring, I get told it will be two to three days before someone can come out to look at the problem. Good freakin' luck.
    • Time Warner subscribes to holistic IT. Why risk invasive repairs when incense and herbs are so much safer?
    • yes, I have TWC in NYC and it SUX.
      My verizon dsl was so much better,
      but they won't wire my new apt.
      something about the neighbor's
      backyard and pitbulls were a few of
      the obstacles they mentioned.

    • How can TW be responsible for some third party physically damaging cables (s)he had no right to touch? Is TW also responsible if the power company "browns out" so your computer won't work? What about if your dog chews through the UTP cable inside your house?

      I understand their customer service could be better, but to say they are incapable of maintaining a cable connection when somebody else destroys it, is just silly.

      • How can TW be responsible for some third party physically damaging cables (s)he had no right to touch?
        I distinctly remember telling them to either bury them under the ground or put them them up on poles and that, while it might sound like a compromise, just running them along the gutter wasn't a smart move.

        • I distinctly remember telling them to either bury them under the ground or put them them up on poles and that, while it might sound like a compromise, just running them along the gutter wasn't a smart move.
          I work for TWC's customer support, and to be honest, hanging the wire under the overhang is sometimes the only option we have for securing the cable so it's not laying on your front lawn.

          We have a large list of all the zones in our district, all with specific building codes and regulations that state what we can and cannot do with the cable. Some places actually ban us completely from burying any new wires or doing anything to repair them (as the construction/tearup of the ground would look unsightly), so the most that we're left to do is to try and neaten up the cable as best possible (though some city zones even forbid this. You don't want to be a customer living in those areas.)
          • I work for TWC's customer support

            You shouldn't have told me that - now I'm going to hassle you endlessly! ;)

            Seriously though, what's up with the crappy pixellated images on the digital cable channels, and the blocking and tiling on the HD channels? We've had reps out to our house to look at it, we've tried every suggestion TWC made to fix it, and it still happens. Is it like that for everyone, or do I just live in an area with too little bandwidth?

    • Re:With their reliability, TWC hotspots are worthl (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:39AM (#18854107)
      Roadrunner works GREAT for me. I couldn't be happier.

      Obviously, some people have better luck than others. I am a very happy RR customer and look forward to using these hotspots as they come online.
        • I have a similar experience. Time Warner has treated me very well. They keep increasing my bandwidth without increasing the price, and recently they got news servers with almost two weeks of article retention! Just to download the headers for that much data takes a long time. I'm scared of moving out of Central New York partly because I don't expect to get an equally competent ISP somewhere else. Verizon has recently installed fiber optics in my neighborhood, but I looked at their offer and scoffed: They wi
          • Where in Central NY are you? I'm in Ithaca, and I've had RR for a few years now, at the same address. The reliability is decent, and they haven't raised prices, but I haven't noticed this bandwidth increase that you speak of. Which to me is a bad sign. In this business, if you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.
            • They just doubled the bandwidth here in the Capital District. And just to pour salt in the wound, my area just received a new promotion for new customer's... their cable/VoIP/RR service for $99 a month. New customers only, but we just moved into a new apartment, so we count as new customers. Not sure if it's in the whole Capital District, though... Verizon just came through and dropped the lines for FIOS, so I'm assuming these new deals by Time Warner is an attempt to staunch the flow of people switching o
          • I used to have reliability issues with my RR connection, but after replacing my cable modem with a new model, it has been flawless.

            Also, some time in the last few months, they have massively upgraded their news servers here in Kansas City. Not only do they have 2 weeks of retention, but I can download from the newsgroups at around 7.5mb/s
        • I agree....while RoadRunner is pricier than the other options (even compared to Cox -- who owned the monopoly rights to my neighborhood up until about a year and a half ago), but neither Cox nor RR gave me connection fits. I tried DSL once and couldn't ever get it to work. Returned their hardware and cancelled service.

          I look at AT&T for DSL every once in a while (and Grande for a bundle, too), but neither serve my area in north Austin with anything more than the lowest speed DSL (1.5Mbps). Since I wo
    • Welcome to the world of wired communications. Judging by your comment, it sounds like you've never had a dialup or DSL connection. While typical dialup problems were noise on the line, the world of DSL is (was) a fun one. I provisioned DSL circuits for a regional (Maine through virginia / East coast) ISP back in the late 90's. We would often spend months trying to get Covad/Northpoint/NAS to get Verizon to install circuits, only to learn that either the loop was too long, or that the line was poor quali
    • Service is good in Houston.

      I don't use warner cable (Dish) because the "digital" cable signal was digital crap. The signals were much better five years ago than today. I don't think they are watching their satellites any more. You get something that is a bad signal on a 27" TV and yet other stations are crystal clear. To me that says they are taking a bad signal, digitizing it and sending that out.

      However... my cable connection is fine and runs about $54 a month.
      • I worked at the TWC in Houston a few years back and they were doing this THEN. I don't understand why the sudden announcement...

        Maybe it was for business class customers only.. but I don't think that was the case.
      • Competition drives price down, so suppliers reduce reliability (and quality and customer service etc) to compensate for the lower prices. Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone. This favours the suppliers with the lowest price but the worst reliability.

        • Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone.

          Naive potential customers can't. However, the general consensus in this area that the Cable is cheaper for the same speed levels, but the downtime over the last five years has averaged about ten times higher, including regular multi-day outages. This is easily discovered with even the slightest effort at research. The local university Mac support mailing li

      • Re:With their reliability, TWC hotspots are worthl (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thrillseeker (518224) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:56AM (#18854391)
        Reliability is inversely proportional to competition. As competition increases, reliability decreases.

        Your astute economic analysis explains why after 70 years that Toyota, the horrendously unreliable competition to ultra-reliable GM, is now the world's top selling car manufacturer ...

        oh wait ...

      • As competition increases, reliability decreases. Why would this be so? It is not in the competition's vested interest for you to have a reliable connection from their competitor
        How is one company able to influence the reliability of another's products and infrastructure? Sabotage? [WYACA] Perhaps Mercedes have an army of highly trained gremlins dropping sugar into the fuel tank of any BMW they see.
          • The first vehicles were made to last longer, vehicles today have maybe a tenth of the lifespan

            You know of a time when cars were designed to run for one million miles or fifty years, whichever came first?

            The first cars, mass-produced or not, broke down ALL THE TIME. If they seemed to last longer, it's because (1) people didn't drive nearly as much as they do today, and (2) they were constantly maintaining them.

  • let the phishing begin! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:28AM (#18853937)
    She said ISPs should embrace Fon because the routers, which require that "aliens" enter a valid credit card number before getting online, put a sharp stop to the leeching.

    Moves like this really don't seem to help the public in terms of security education, IMHO...
      • Just enter your credit card number and expiration date and you can use my wireless...trust me, it's that new-fangled Fon thingy...it's for your security. :)

  • But...??? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mwvdlee (775178) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:30AM (#18853965) Homepage
    What about yesterday's news that "Open WAP = Probable Cause?"?

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/23/14 31211 [slashdot.org]

    • Re:But...??? (Score:4, Informative)

      by larkost (79011) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:48AM (#18854251)
      They are not proposing an open connection, but rather a closed one where everyone who is a Time Warner customer would have a login that would work on every participating hotspot. Logins and sessions would be tracked, so they would always know what login was associated with what IP for a given time. This takes care of the legal problems (unless people share their passwords), but does open up some privacy ones as this would allow Time Warner to have a mountain of data about when people are on the internet (not necessarily where they go, but when and where they connected).

  • Why would a home broadband customer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spamking (967666) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:32AM (#18854003)

    want to turn their connection into a free wireless hot-spot?

    You pay for a 1-4 MB connection and have the potential to share it with 20-30 of your closest friends or what? Wouldn't be worth it in my opinion unless you're a business or something and just want to attract customers.

    • Re:Why would a home broadband customer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RealSurreal (620564) * on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:46AM (#18854211)
      Two reasons. One, you get free access to all other Fon wireless APs around the world. Two, you can instead opt to receive part of the revenue your hotspot generates and forego the free access elsewhere.

      That's the theory. In practice, I don't see hotspots in any locations I might want to get access from (because they're nearly all residential and I use wifi hotspots on business) and, for the same reason, I can't see a residential hotspot generating much revenue.

    • Re:Why would a home broadband customer (Score:5, Informative)

      by Andy Dodd (701) <atd7&cornell,edu> on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:47AM (#18854231) Homepage
      The article isn't too clear on this, but if you go to Fon's site at http://www.fon.com/ [fon.com], you'll see that Fon defines three user types:

      Aliens - Non-FON users who pay for access at FON access points belonging to either of the following groups.
      Linuses - FON users who do not receive any monetary compensation (other than a majorly discounted router), but get free access to any FON access point owned by a Linus or Bill
      Bills - FON users who get 50% of the proceeds from aliens using their access point. They don't get free access to other FON APs owned by Bills or Linuses.

      So if you live in the middle of nowhere, it makes lots of sense to become a Linus. Your AP will almost never be used by others (and if it is, you can restrict their bandwidth to a reasonably large degree), but you get free access to any other FON APs when you're on the road.
    • well if you are a Linus then you are just into sharing if you are a Bill then you get a 50% cut of the take on any day passes sold from your spot
      (and of course if you link out to some other pay site then....)

  • Huge implications (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jarich (733129) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:35AM (#18854041) Homepage Journal
    Two things spring to mind... first, RR will leap forward to be the most popular ISP everywhere this is offered.

    Second, no-one can sue you if they can't prove you were downloading the movie... if you've got a public WiFi, it could've been anyone, right?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by netscan (1028690)
      I would suppose that you would be able to claim the same protections that ISPs if you are found not to be responsible for the illegal activity, it still would not protect you from an actual visit from the 5-0. Anything they find in your home/PC would still be fair game
    • Given where I live, and many of the people I know around here with the same oppioin, the only way RR is gonna be number 1 here is if they pay people to have RR.

      And those people will then get WoW, SBC/Ameritech or dialup connections and use those for better performance/reliability...
    • SO, who the fuck is RR? Or are we all supposed to know this already. Maybe in your ward!

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by RobertLTux (260313)
        Inside the Time Warner group RR is Road Runner (yes btw that Road Runner) this would be the name for timewarner cable internet service
        the reverse dns for a Road Runner customer should look like cpe-#ip address#.#region#.res.rr.com
        this breaks down to
        cpe= Customer Premises Equipment
        ip address = what do you think?? you do belong on Slashdot right??
        region = "which" timewarner
        res =residential service
        rr.com = primary domain

        (oh btw triad ips seem to be more or less static)

  • La Fonera Routers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Universal Indicator (626874) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:49AM (#18854269)
    La Fonera routers are great: They sent me mine for free, and then I reflashed it with DD-WRT. It's a real piece of crap, but I can't complain about getting a free router :-)

  • TW not first, see Speakeasy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eefsee (325736) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @09:00AM (#18854457)
    http://www.speakeasy.net/ [speakeasy.net] has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.

    FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.

  • AT&T has had this for ages (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nexus7 (2919) on Tuesday April 24 2007, @09:04AM (#18854511)
    AT&T (nee SBC, nee Ameritech) DSL customers in Chicago (probably all IL) get access to all their wi-fi hotspots for a token $1 a month. You get pretty good tech support too, they'll patiently walk you through the login page, rest your password, etc. at 9 PM for $1 a month. Death Star maybe, but they do their homework.
  • This may be a new thing in the U.S., but it has been part of the multiplay packages going in all over Europe.

    ISPs who lease or just install a CPE box will have multiple WiFi SSIDs running. One for the client, the other advertising their network. So whenever a client roams and finds an access point with the name of their provider, they can use their login credentials and get their own internet connection. This second connection is completely separate from the client's connection, there is no shared IP address or bandwidth.

    I think there is a big gap in knowledge of how modern broadband works between those in the U.S. and those in Europe or the Far East. I'm seeing this more and more on american oriented sites like slashdot, "ignorance" is too strong a word, but certainly "lack of understanding" comes close. Internet technologies are pulling way ahead outside of the U.S., where the last mile has seen great advances in both business models and creative uses of technology. When the bandwidth of the last mile (between a head-end and the customer premises) gets sufficient to put multiple channels down the line, the client can get much, much more than just an internet connection. With fibre installations going in, the bandwidth can support multiple HD video channels, multiple internet connections, multiple voice channels, private VPN options, roaming, etc. A client can just choose which bandwidth package they want, e.g. Symmetric or Asymmetric, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps or more. A handful of TV channels, or more than you could ever watch. VoIP calling plans, that are so cheap that calling most of Europe or North America is free for the first few thousand minutes.

    So one of the providers in the U.S. had an executive who took a vacation in Europe, saw the amazing new multiplay boxes, and decided it was a good idea to beat their few oligarchic non-rivals to the punch. I'm glad it's News for Nerds in the U.S., things are looking up over there.

    the AC

    this post needs some emoticons for slight amounts of sarcasm, some humour, and kind of a tsk-tsk sideways look indicating a mix of sympathy and pity, good luck finding /. moderations for that
  • For Bittorent and other p2p users living in big metro areas this would provide a good level of cover from the MAFIAA. So long as they use a separate public IP for their FON then they'll be covered as a common carrier. If they can maintain at least one other user on their FON network then the mafiaa won't be able to tell which user was the one that did the illegal uploading.

    When they serve their court order for the FON log the best they can get is a list of users who were connected at that time. I bet they w
  • I don't know why any kind of additional agreements would be needed... people should be able to do what they like with their Net connections, but that's kind of irrelevant. I like the FON setup. It still needs a lot of work to make it more professional looking in the US, but the principle behind it is good. I've paid to use several different FON hotspots because I don't have Net usage at home (If I had Net at home, I could share it, and use all other FON hotspots for free). If I get a home Net connection

    • Re:"Free" wifi hotsputs, huh (Score:5, Informative)

      by Inexile2002 (540368) * on Tuesday April 24 2007, @08:55AM (#18854379) Homepage Journal
      Yes, you are missing something.

      You maintain a hotspot (with two SSIDs, one with a 10 digit WEP key, the other open) and let people access your hotspot over the open SSID. In turn, you either get half the revenue generated on your hotspot, or you get free access to any other hotspot operated by FON. If you live in a high density area (near a Starbucks, big apartment etc) you can subsidize your hotspot, if you don't you get free wifi roaming. If you're not interested in either, don't get the router. It's not like Time Warner is going to force you to sign up.

      They charge $2 a day for access and don't have density in the US yet (they're bigger in Europe and Asia) but they seem to be growing. Personally, I've run across one FON hotspot when I actually needed one, and found two more when I didn't really need access or had a wired connection, but there's a Starbucks near my house (in Toronto) where the Chinese restaurant next door runs a FON access point. I've never been (don't like Starbucks coffee) but my friends use the FON signal all the time.

      Ultimately, what this means is that Time Warner is allowing (encouraging?) people to maintain open access points, and will update their terms of service to reflect this.
      • Does TimeWarner indemnify themselves in case you get prosecuted for crimes committed on your open access point that they encouraged/paid you to open up? Considering the recent legal precedent on this question, who in their right mind would leave an access point open, even if they could be paid for doing so?
        • That way they could have one for the AP and one for your traffic. Since the AP is almost certainly natted, they could even have the AP give out addresses on a 10.x subnet and perform NAT at the router for the neighborhood. That way it wouldn't be possible to tell whether a particular packet came from my Access Point or my neighbors.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jaqenn (996058)

      So wait,

      I pay Time Warner for bandwidth. Then I use Fonera's software so that I can give my bandwidth away to others. They pay Fonera a couple bucks for a day of access, and Fonera splits this price with Time Warner.

      Anything I'm missing here?

      My understanding is something like this: Aliens pay Fonera $X per day of access. Fonera used to take a Y% cut of the money, and give the rest to you for the use of your bandwidth. After this deal, Fonera will take a Y% cut, Time Warner will take another Z% cut, and you get the rest for the use of your bandwidth.

      That's a lot off the top, but if it's not worth it then don't sign up. I expect they will adjust their payouts until they get enough interest.

      The big change here is that Time Warner is get

    • There are some restaurants and/or cafes in the US that offer free WiFi. Two that spring immediately to mind are Panera [panera.com] and the McDonalds I occasionally frequent with my 3-year-old (not all MickeyD's offer free WiFi, but the number that do has risen signficantly). Many smaller cafe's also offer free WiFi. Starbuck's is a notable exception; this is part of the reason I don't frequent Starbucks. Many of those smaller cafes with free WiFi also serve superior coffee :-)

    • I've noticed a few Starbucks in Toronto charging $8/month for wifi that can be used in any Starbucks restaurant. Wifi is pretty widespread in Toronto so you can usually access Starbucks' neighbour's signal from inside the cafe. $8 is a good fee for municipal wifi, though in Toronto that pretty much sums up the Starbucks penetration.

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