Bell Canada Turns Payphones into Public Hotspots

turing0 writes "Bell Canada yesterday announced a trial of a new public wifi hotspot service - currently free - with locations in either airports, railway stations or bus terminals in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston. Bell has adopted an interesting twist on the hotspot in that they have built a steel armored case, in which to house the AP, a DSL modem and power supply, which is the exact dimensions of a payphone -- and mounted the whole thing in place of a single phone where there are banks of them such as you see in airports and bus terminals or subways. According to this article in the Globe and Mail Bell has still not determined the pricing model."

turing0 continues: "I attended the press conference at Toronto's Union Station, Track F, where I took a close look at the AP box which was mounted quite securely to a bank of payphones, and I was pretty impressed at how solid it appeared as various journalistic hacks took turns trying to pry the AP off the wall under the watch of Bell execs and a Bell phone tech. Bell is using Cisco AP1200's in the box as well as Alcatel ADSL modems with a 3Mb/Sec ADSL/ATM backhaul to the internet according to the Bell tech present. Various Bell types were wandering about with a pretty diverse collection of hardware such as Apple iBooks, Compaq PDA and IBM Thinkpads with 802.11 cards from Proxim, Cisco and Symbol as well as Dlink and SMC. Great use of a fully amortized asset (phone banks) and a very interesting spin on how to generate new revenue from a dying cost center - the payphone biz. Plus the added benefit of not having to negotiate new agreements with property management and landlords. Smooth move for Bell. Why didn't I think of that? Payphones, though declining in numbers, are still pretty much ubiquitous and are served with power as well as a good solid mounting location for the AP. In the final deployment Bell said that they would also be mounting AP's in the plenum and riser infrastructure of selected buildings should the full roll-out of the Accesszone product proceed. Is Bell Canada the first ILEC to recycle payphones?"

How do you take payments on this?

[mhesseltine]

Ok, I understand how, with a "Public Internet Terminal" like those cheesy ads on DirecTV, you get paid by people putting in money or swiping a credit card. How does this work with a wireless access point? Your card is going to pick up a signal. You may not want to key your credit card info over the airwaves to this unknown box. Do you walk up to the box, swipe your card, then key in the MAC address of your wireless card?

Basically, what's phase 2 where

1. Install public 802.11 access point
2. ???
3. Profit.

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[pr0c]

I don't understand all the ins and outs of networking perfectly but it seams this would be simple..

1.) You enter the "hot spot"
2.) The terminal picks up your network card and gets the mac address
3.) If your network card is set on DHCP then no matter what URL you bring up it redirects you to a payment gateway
4.) after you pay you get to go anywhere :)

Sounds too easy to me, perhaps this isn't possible hehe..

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[HeghmoH]

I don't know how they actually do it, but one easy scheme comes to mind. The network is kept open, but unidentified users are blocked. Any port 80 requests are redirected to their authentication server which asks for your username and password. It also has a signup page where you can give your credit card number and get a username instantly. Once you authenticate, outbound connection are allowed, and you're good to go. If you're afraid of putting in your credit card over a wireless connection, well, one hopes they'd use https, and if you don't trust that, then you should probably just keep all your money in your mattress anyway.

pricing model

[matman]

Here's a pricing model - register with Bell Canada through normal means (mail, phone, internet, etc) and obtain a digital certificate that authenticates you, to them. Before being allowed out through the DSL modem, some gateway would check to ensure that the digital certificate was signed by bell; it would record how much you use the system and report to Bell's central system. They would then bill you at the end of the month. Bell would have to make it easy to do the certificate authentication; I'm thinking IPSec or a browser certificate that would be necessary to get through a proxy. There are many possible solutions on the technical side.

Re:Also from Bell

[gorilla]

Why would Bell compete with itself on so many levels?

I think it's because it's basically a win-win situation. In places like Union station there are banks of pay phones, and maybe enough traffic to justify 10% or 20% of them. Replacing one phone with an Wifi stand, another with an internet phone and a third with a calling card machine, and they've still got enough pay phones to cover all the traffic. The wifi stand and the internet phone are competing with each other, but the sum is greater than either alone would be.

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[swb]

Hmm.

1) Hijack access point
2) Fake service payment screens via same intercept tech
3) Profit, illegally

Why power companies aren't doing this

[Nonac]

Phone companies have almost free bandwidth back to their own ISP. Power companies don't. They'd have to pay both a phone company and an ISP for bandwidth.

Re:Do existing agreements cover this?

[PatientZero]

I would guess that the contracts allow Bell Canada to use the space for any "communications service." I seriously doubt they would have limited themselves by specifying just "phone service."

I'm just glad that's one place I haven't seen pasted over with advertising.

Re:How do you take payments on this?

[ptomblin]

Don't even need to hijack the existing one, just set up your own access point. Some people are likely to connect to it thinking it's the Bell one. Then even though your credit card payment screens look remarkably like Bell's, you're really selling them a service (wireless access through your own DSL or cable modem) and are probably getting closer to being legal.

Re:Strange market

[thebigmacd]

Kingston is a relatively major hub along the VIA Rail Windsor-to-Montreal line. Greyhound has lots of routes to there too. It's sort of the last stop before Ottawa or Montreal. You have a point though...the station is TINY. Not too many people stick around. Not like Union Station in Toronto.

Re:I disagree

[yelligsc]

I think maybe you missed the point.

As I understand the parent to your reply:

- No one is using pay phones for voice calls anymore because they have a personal phone number in their pocket

- Therefore all the payphones which the telcos have access to (and I would assume cost money to maintain) are not bringing in the dollars.

- So the conclusion can be drawn that if some other form of profit can be drawn from these payphones, it would be beneficial to the telcos.

Anyway, with that said I think this is an AWESOME idea. The pay phones have copper going to them that can run DSL, and some type of power source already at the phone.

Its so obvious I cant believe I didnt dream it up!

Scott.

Re:Senseless post!

[yelligsc]

How in gods name is this insightful?

They just reposted the comments they were replying to. It even says senseless post in the title!

Come on moderators! PAY ATTENTION!

Scott.