WiFi & the NBN
Why is WiFi so open in the rest of the world but so closed in Australia?
I am not about to argue that the Government’s proposed National Broadband Network is a waste of money because everyone these days is going WiFi, that’s just crazy talk and the many punters who have been expressing that opinion clearly know nothing about the issue at all.
The NBN is about data to the home and the office, WiFi is for roaming around within the home, the office or, in this case the train. Yes I am writing this post from a train in the UK. The bandwidth is not what you’d call broadband but it’s good enough that I can say hi to my wife via iChat before she hits the hay back home.
The NBN promises 100MB per second of data to the home. The fastest WiFi on the market is based on a draft of the 802.11n spec, invented at home in Australia by the CSIRO, which promises, and almost delivers around 155Kbps in real-world conditions like my house. The difference is staggering.
What I really do want to talk about is the impact that having such fast data to every home, office, cafe, backpackers’ and so forth could have on the opening up of WiFi.
When you travel outside of Australia, be it most anywhere in the USA, UK, Europe or Asia, finding open, unprotected WiFi hotspots is pretty well the norm.
Go on a driving tour of the USA and to find a hotel in the town you’ve just turned up in all you need to do it pull up at any cafe, hotel or whatever and flip open the lid of your MacBook, iPhone, iPdd Touch or whatever WiFi enabled device you might use and voila, you are sure to find an open WiFi you can jump onto and google away to book somewhere to stay. Backpacking in Vietnam? Same deal. Every pho hut has free WiFi. Holidaying in Provence? Every French B&B and hotel I have visited offers free WiFi as matter of course.
Compare that to home where most hotels like to charge you $9 per hour, or anything up to $40 per night for the privilege of using their patchy internet connection in the room you probably just paid a fortune for. I mean do they charge you for the power you use, or the water? Each towel?
Why is WiFi so open in the rest of the world but so closed in Australia?
It’s the way data gets charged down under that is the problem. I’ve lived all over the world and Australia is the only country I have ever had to pay by the MB for my data. It’s the only place I have ever had monthly data caps imposed on my home or office internet access. That miserly attitude to data is the primary reason people don’t just open their WiFi up as a matter of course.
Indeed if I didn’t have a monthly cap on my home internet connection I’d happily leave my network open for the neighbours to leech off. But I do, so I don’t, and that’s a shame.
Negative Nancies will moan about security but for people running inherently secure platforms (my house and my office are all Mac; but if Macs are not for you then Linux and other Unix systems are also secure by design). Understand that firewalls only offer the illusion of security for people running sloppy systems. For those who have the common sense to get themselves a proper sMime certificate or PGP key so they can encrypt their communications properly, there is nothing to fear by opening up your WiFi.
By way of an analogy, in the USA and Russia you get charged a fee to receive as well as make mobile phone calls. This patently unfair situation retarded the development of mobile phone usage in these countries for years.
Anyone who’s experienced the phone system in either the USA or Russia today knows just how rubbish it still is there. Phone usage and consequently handset development in Europe and Asia dominated the globe as a result.
Right now our whole thinking about mobile internet is skewed to slow, expensive networks like Edge and, in the cities, 3G at best and that’s quite simply a national joke.
I believe the proposed rollout of the NBN offers a huge opportunity for all Australians and visitors to our sunburned shores. I dream of the day when we all have so much bandwidth in our homes and offices that the disincentive to open our WiFi to guests, neighbours and transient passers-by is gone and a whole new generation of WiFi enabled devices facilitates a phase-shift in personal, corporate and machine-to-machine communications.
Then we’ll finally have a national communications infrastructure that is truly on a par with the rest of the world.
Dave Sag
Dave Sag is a founder and Executive Director of Carbon Planet Limited, a global carbon emissions management company. He has a multi-decade career in information technology and has been travelling the globe with a laptop of some description for over 15 years.
Twitter: @davesag
LINKS:
- Carbon Planet Limited – http://www.carbonplanet.com
- 802.11n – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11n
- sMime Certificates – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME
- PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) – http://www.pgpi.org/
- Firewall’s False sense of security: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=100021
Douglascomms
May 15, 2009 at 1:25 am
finally some sense on fttp NBN and the wifi issue
apart from supporting Dave in his quite lucid comments regarding the difference between a fibre to the premises NBN and a wifi last mile as an alternative I'd like to add that wireless communication does not offer the same upgrade pathway that newly installed fibre does.
if copper cables installed fifty or more years ago has provided an upgrade path to ADSL 2, imagine the posibilities fibre offers. The speeds we're talking about with the current configuration are merely the first generation of what promises to be the greatest improvement in productivity this country has seen since the telephone system was first installed.
the fibre to the premises NBN is broadcast television, radio, roads, smart metering, narrow cast cable TV, videconferencing, distance education, healthcare etc etc all rolled into one.
and the notion that this upgrade path could in any way be replaced by a wireless alternative is, as Dave suggests a JOKE.
JV Douglas –
technology writer by trade, luddite by conviction
artech05
June 23, 2009 at 2:23 am
WiFi &NBN
Hi Dave
You might be interested in this interview with Jerry Watkins on ABC's Future Tense. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2583180.htm
He has been working on a research project with Intel for a number of years – some parallells in thoughts.
Cheers
Angelina Russo