4th
Public wifi - how could it get so bad?
Warning: This is a rant.
With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.
In the case of wireless access points (AP) owned and operated by cafes/restaurants, they are:
- often connected through a patchwork of bad power, telephone, and network cables, usually piled on top of each other next to the cash register to ensure a reboot every cash register kachink
- using a cheap and buggy access point that freezes up every 30 minutes
- unencrypted/open, and long since discovered and overloaded by P2P freeloaders
- configured to the same channel as the other 10 access points around, causing “mysterious” packet loss of 50%+
- configured with the same SSID (e.g., linksys) as the other 10 access points around, making actual selection a stroke of luck
- practically unmanaged. It’s always better to just go over and try to fix it yourself if something’s wrong; if you ask the staff they’re usually completely clueless, and will try to call someone almost as clueless, before finally you’ve spent a good hour helping them just get the thing working.
In the case of commercial access points, while they’re more professionally installed and run, the access and management systems kill the experience. Here are typical problems:
- Filtering of everything but port 80 (web) - goodbye IMAP, IRC, etc. I can’t do any work when all I can do is browse (yeah, I know I could set up a tunnel over port 80, and I may have to start doing that sigh).
- You have to first go through a “home made” web application to register and sign in, which you often can’t due to bugs on the web application preventing you from registering;
- failure to localize phone numbers or addresses
- missing web pages
- 500 server errors
- failure to send SMS or email registration messages
- Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be anyone monitoring or receiving these server errors; if there were, I wouldn’t be hitting them nearly as often.
- If you’ve managed to sign in, you can expect to be suddenly locked out if you close your laptop and open it again since your old session hasn’t expired, and they have “smart” sessions.
I have yet to find a good web application like this. In my opinion they should be banned altogether. The internet is not the same as the web, so just requiring you to go through such a manual and unreliable system to get online is insane.
If I have to guess, I would have to guess that these systems are designed, implemented, bought, and managed by incompetent people as well, people that:
- Don’t understand or value simplicity and reliability, always erring on making things too complicated and thus unreliable
- Think the web is the Internet, so they don’t see anything wrong in “breaking” the Internet by disabling everything but the web
- Think you can just build-and-forget, relying on (expensive) customer bug reports (that often have an unhappy ending) instead of proactively managing and fixing problems
What works?
I have been using wifi extensively in a few places around the world (Beijing, Hong Kong, Budapest, Singapore, San Francisco), and the only wifi access points I’ve seen that work are those that are free and run by clueful coffee shop or restaurant owners that know to:
- invest in robust cabling, and put the AP out of harms way
- invest in proper training of staff, and howto material
- invest in proper installation that
- sets the access point SSI to something unique, the name of the venue is perfect as well as good advertisement
- configures the access point to use a channel that doesn’t conflict with other nearby access points
- changes the admin password to non-default one (most amateur access points do not)
- adds encryption (WPA is the only secure thing these days)
- change the WPA password every day (using a hex key), and has it written down on a piece of paper they can hand out to guests
- advertise wifi availability and instructions for getting online prominently
In addition, for laptop users, it’s also always good to have power sockets around. 