Is your city becoming a wi-fi mesh zone?

Filed in archive Wireless on April 25, 2007

In USA, Europe and Asia cities are fast becoming wi-fi mesh zones. Don't know what that means? Put simply, if you carry a wi-fi enabled notebook computer with you and you open and start-up your computer it is highly likely that you will be able to connect to a broadband Internet connection for nothing, or in some cases for a daily fee, monthly fee or a 12 month plan.

This type of broadband service is likely to be coming to a city near you. In USA there are hundreds of cities installing wi-fi- mesh coverage of at least the major business sector of a city, but in some cases the entire metropolitan area. (See my Google Notebook page "Mesh Wi-Fi" to see the services becoming available in USA, Ireland, Canada, Italy and Singapore).

Many of these wi-fi services covering a city requires a payment by user. But in some cases there is no cost. And when there is no cost a value in connecting hundreds if not thousands of people in a city needs to be obtained, and this is where privacy concerns arise. If you are not paying for your service, then at least the carrier needs to have names, contact details and even addresses so that this information can be sold. Because these wi-fi city mesh connections provide a service in a set location there is a real value in selling contact details of people connected in those cities. It is in this context that there are real privacy concerns.

Londoners (England) are already the most watched people in the world, and the new mesh wi-fi network is only going to make this worse. To use the new mesh wi-fi service in the middle of London, users are going to need to reveal a wide range of information. The system will also be able to track exactly where in the mesh you are; imagine how useful that is to the carrier to sell that type of information to businesses in the area.

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