Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points – and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they’re reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware. NTT says it's successfully tested network sharing …
Blah blah blockchain blah blah.
Can't see any advantage over just having a back end database of users who can authorise, and log.
Fortunately consumer Wi-Fi sharing is brand new, and so there isn't any examples of companies in various countries already doing this for many years.
Consumer WiFi sharing is brand new is it?
Been tried before although not necessarily in a model where AP owners would be paid. And there is the big issue people were nervous of signing up to share their WiFi where the only benefit was to use other people's WiFi.
There are a lot of concers here about security, but if you offer people money some of them will forget about security concerns just for the promise of micropayments.
Not sure if your last sentence is sarcasm but, for the record, WiFi sharing has been around at least since 2006 when FON began its service. I wrote about it here: https://sketharaman.com/blog/2006/09/10/is-web-30-going-to-mean-user-generated-internet-access/.
More recently, Helium is taking a shot at this, just with blockchain / crypto tokenomics. Here's the NYT article on it: https://archive.ph/PuzB6.
The 'reasonable use' clause will get a hammering. The reason providers can afford to offer decent rates on connections is because the law of averages says that not everyone will be capping-out their connection limits all the time. If someone happens to be in a popular spot and their connection gets heavy use, the provider will most certainly see this as unreasonable use and bill them accordingly.
Nice idea - certainly very public-spirited - but there are issues with opening up a private connection for general use that go far beyond the basic security aspects.
In this case, NTT is the provider, and they have massive fiber infrastructure throughout Tokyo, so at least that part of it won't be a problem.
Given that many US and UK ISPs have been sharing your leased modem out on an isolated network with their own branded wifi, without you having any say in it besides buying your own in a model they don't support (a far better financial choice anyway), NTT is way behind the curve here.
It sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Or rather, a marketing department trying to find something to do with a rather large surplus of WiFi gateways that they have control over... I've never been much of a fan of those shared WiFi services as you never know what you're connecting to or what's potentially connecting to your home network, often over an aging router with software that's entirely dependent on some old telco, and it's not as if that's ever gone wrong in the past.
"Haven't Fon and BT being sharing residential wifi for years?"
Similar in the Netherlands. E.g. Ziggo (cable TV/Internet provider) claims to have 2 million 'Wifispots' across the country. Not sure how relevant that is now that most phone contracts include a generous or unlimited 4G/5G data bundle.
That is what got me, what NTT are proposing isn’t new, AP sharing was a growing thing (in the UK) until the law was changed making the owner of the AP liable for all communications over their WiFi/Internet connection…
The only new thing is the spurious use of blockchain, to implement what BT and The Cloud do with much simpler technology.
The idea of reusing this unused bandwidth rather than deploying more is sound.
However not sure why exactly the underlying technology needs to be blockchain-related:
- is there a requirement for distributed information? Doesn't seem like it, as NTT has all the customers information
- Is there a need for a 'smart contract'? No need to do this on-the-fly, customers already have contracts with NTT, and NTT will have contracts with the WiFi owners. All that needs to be provided is an authentication gateway
- does it need to keep all the info forever? Not really, just as long as it takes for the bills to be paid, or whatever statutory legal minimum. In fact keeping location history forever is very questionable
The technology may be there but there are a lot of other issues.
I can see that folks will be concerned about the security of their personal or business networks with random strangers connecting to their APs. I can also v see that Pele would be concerned for the security of their devices when connected to random strangers APs.
The biggest concerns I see however are not in any way technological, they are contractual.
Does your contract with your connectivity provider allow you to resell their services? If not you'd potentially be in breach of contract with your ISP were you to sign up for this.
Does your contract with your ISP state that you are legally responsible for anything that goes on over your connection? If so how do these people suggest you overcome that?
And v what about folks with data limits on their contracts?
The only way I can see these hurdles being overcome is if NTT enter into contracts with ISPs who will of course want their cut.
So there will be a block chain record associated with a billing identifier for both the supplicant and access point provider? This sounds like an excellent resource to mine if I wanted to track the whereabouts of people. It is inevitable that a deanonymization attack will be developed to unmask the identity of the provers and supplicants.
I'm pretty sure this problem has been solved before more easily. The AP has a special SSID that may communicate only with a remote VPN portal. (Bridging+isolation+filtering) The VPN portal handles authentication and use credits.
It requires a moderately beefy AP to handle more than a handful of clients at once. Some are even hardcoded to 10!
> Some are even hardcoded to 10!
The client limit on WiFi APs is something the WiFi Alliance is quiet about. This has enabled both AP OEMs and ISPs to use smaller and cheaper silicon in their “free” routers. Additionally, with 4G the network can also limit the number of concurrent active 4G client sessions from unique home network IP addresses.
I note that BT and some others are now offering better routers which can suppport larger DHCP etc. tables and putting a marketing spin on it “supports up to 100 devices”…
Aside a draytek AP 912C retails at around £160 (router separate purchase). it supports a maximum of 128 active users per radio, so as it is dual band that’s a maximum of 256 active users. So in comparison the £50 ISP router/WiFi device is going to be constrained.
> Does your contract with your connectivity provider allow you to resell their services? .... Does your contract with your ISP state that you are legally responsible...
I am pretty sure that Spectrum (one of the least-liked cable operators in the US) has been doing this for years. Aside from public "hot-spots", and random-SSID portals on residential (family) WiFi, I have often seen an additional "Guest" portal which was wide-open to ALL. I understood it was "Spectrum being nice to neighbors" (ha!). I believe (hope?) that the stranger traffic does not come off my thin sliver of data quota; that Spectrum accounts it separately. When I found this on my WiFi I turned it off, but my neighbor has it open.
> ...marketing spin on it “supports up to 100 devices”...
Yes, Spectrum's new ad boasts "200 devices!" (Possibly not on my cheap and aging AP.)
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