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Comment by mwsherman | Hacker News Reader

Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology. It has never succeeded. Many NYC public parks offer free wifi and I don’t know anyone that uses it.

4G/LTE/etc is engineered for uncontrolled, outdoor spaces. It works more reliably than Wifi in that environment.

Wifi’s UX is poor in that environment – you’re already connected to 4G but connecting to Wifi requires effort. And one assumes that if one is on the street, one will be walking out of range of that Wifi within a few minutes. I don’t understand the use case.

(The sitting-in-Starbucks use case makes more sense.)

Politicians like the sound of Wifi. Users walking down the street, by and large, ignore it.

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Minor win: it's fantastic for tourists. Roaming kills, and it's great to have access to free wifi (maps, booking sites, e-mail, messaging, whatsapp calls, &c) in a foreign country.

Agreed -- Vienna has free wifi (at least in the CBD) and this was awesome when visiting the city.

And on the Donauinsel! Nothing over drinking with friends at 3am on the Donauinsel and enjoying the free WiFi.

Same for Wellington's waterfront wifi! It was very helpful for quick Skype calls and looking up information, especially when internet anywhere else in the city was very expensive.

The Free Wifi in the train stations in Japan has saved my butt on many occasions :)

Major loss when "bad guys" steal all your credentials or is NYC also providing everyone with free VPN?

If you exchange credentials in plain text, your gonna have a bad time.

That requires either sending login information over http (thankfully rare in 2016) or breaking https, which is much harder nowadays with modern browsers-- most of the tricks sslstrip[1] used no longer work due to key pinning, etc.

1: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/

Not everyone can afford cellular or wired Internet. Municipal wifi raises the floor and keeps the most vulnerable connected.

Are you sure there's a significant set of people who have wifi devices but no data service? I am under the impression that the poor buy data-capable phones over laptops. Even if they can't afford data for their phone, the phone can accept free 4G if it were to be offered.

I'm only one person, but I (and my family) have computers and smartphones but no data. It saves a whole lot of money to be on a prepaid plan when you have wifi in most places you go.

Right, but your smart phone is data capable, i.e., can accept a 4G signal. You don't have a dumbphone alongside a computer with wifi.

mwsherman's original question was "Why would municipalities offer free wifi rather than free 4G?". jws thought it might be important for folks who didn't have data plans. But my point is that if someone has wifi, they also very likely have a smartphone that's capabale of receiving a 4G signal, even if they cannot afford a data plan from their cell network provider.

> But my point is that if someone has wifi, they also very likely have a smartphone that's capabale of receiving a 4G signal, even if they cannot afford a data plan from their cell network provider.

That's a bit of an assumption. I'd like to see some numbers to support it. I know a bunch of people who have wifi capable devices but not devices capable of 4g. Or they have older smartphones that are not 4g capable.

How would you arrange it practically though? You would have to distribute sim cards, and people would have to swap those out with their normal sim card rendering them unreachable by phone. That's ofcourse assuming their phone isn't carrier-locked. Wifi seems a lot more practical unless phones are redesigned to cover this usage pattern.

> mwsherman's original question was "Why would municipalities offer free wifi rather than free 4G?"

This isn't quite how I read the comment, but here are some pretty good answers, I think:

1. They would have to either purchase suitable licensed spectrum (literally hundreds of millions of dollars in NYC) or find an existing carrier with which to form an MVNO relationship with generous enough terms that the city could afford to "resell" the service for free.

2. 4G would probably require NYC to deal with distributing phones or SIM cards, and then users would have to figure out how to unlock their devices.

Oh yeah, especially in emerging markets, where people measure their data allowances by the MB.

> where people measure their data allowances by the MB.

Or in Germany

In NYC a lot of teens carry iPod or cellphones without data plans. They basically just attempt to connect to whatever free wifi is available. I can see this being a game changer for them since they'll always be connected now.

You, like almost everyone else responding to me, have missed the idea that smart phones without data plans still are data capable. (The number of teens without any sort of smartphone carrying around an iPhone that gets wifi is negligible.) The point is that the claim "we should support wifi because the poor don't have devices that can access 4G data" is mistaken.

Yes, there may be technical issues surrounding swapping SIM cards that makes a municipal 4G network unworkable, but this isn't the issue I'm addressing. It's discussed by one of the other commenters. And in fact, this downside would effect the poor the least since they could just pick-up a free municipal SIM card and us it continuously (since they often can't afford a network dataplan), while those who can afford network data plans would constantly need to swap SIM cards.

$30 android tablets with wifi are a pretty good option for being connected.

I have a few obsolete iPads with cellular modems paid up which I "loan" to people who need them. Modern tablets on wifi or even obsolete cellphones on wifi would be better.

(By "loan", I mean I pay the person to take care of some task for me and provide the device so they can do that, but it keeps them and their children online while they sort out their financial situation. Being a teenager without social internet in the US sucks badly at this point. You become "that kid".)

With regards to 4G, any spectrum which can be used for 4G has been bought for billions by the telecom oligopoly. If they wished the poor to have access to social connectivity, they would have done it. At least in the US we politically can't spin up a "basic level" telecom system as a government service. It isn't in our national narrative. So, engineering be damned, it's WiFi or nothing. And lets hope we can keep the telecom oligopoly from jamming Wifi. (Looking at you Verizon and T-Mobile with your LTE-U plans.)

I don't need to do anything to connect to my providers public networks. The keys are (I'm guessing) just stored in the SIM card and I'm automatically connected when there is WiFi available. LTE being super fast and all, I don't mind not using my data plan and having a low latency, high bandwidth connection without even lifting a finger.

You also seem to overestimate how many people can afford a data plan like we (probably) have. Or just young people. Or people who don't use the Internet that often at all. It is probably not ment for the average HN-reader.

>>The keys are (I'm guessing) just stored in the SIM card

They're not. They keys (and many other things) are stored in "carrier settings" that your provider pushes to your smartphone. In the past we had to set things up like APN & etc manually for the internet to work but not anymore with the settings being pushed automatically (if the provider supports it).

On iOS you can view the current version of pushed settings by seeing the Settings > General > About -> Carrier option.

"Carrier settings updates are small files that can include updates from Apple and your carrier to carrier-related settings, such as network, calling, cellular data, messaging, personal hotspot, and voicemail settings". [1]

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201270

Ah, even cooler! What I liked about it was how transparent the whole thing was for me. I didn't have to do anything, it just sort of worked.

The issue with LTE is that spectrum is limited. With 30MHz of spectrum, ~2 bps/Hz spectral efficiency and 3 sectors per tower you can provide at most 90Mbps of total downstream capacity per tower. With a density of 10k+ people per km2, a tower serving a one km2 area is easily overloaded. With towers costing hundreds of thousands of USD, things get pretty messy.

Wifi doesn't replace LTE, complements it. No doubt that the UX is still crappy, but SIM-based authentication can solve that.

Also, unlike LTE, wifi spectrum isn't licensed, anyone can set up a hotspot without paying billions to the government. Sure, we could all solve that by switching the entire world to an unlicensed, pay-as-you-use system, but that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

In other words, spectrum is the major constraint in urban areas.

This isn't a substitute for wired municipal internet connections, it's just a sitting-in-starbucks use case that doesn't require you to buy a coffee.

4G/LTE/etc are also impossibly tethered to SIM cards and the greater centralized provider network behind it.

If we could just take the MAC layer from 4G/LTE, I'd be with you, but we can't.

The Wi-fi Alliance has created an standard called Hotspot 2.0, which aims to fix "Wifi UX" in these scenarios. From Wikipedia: "The idea is for mobile devices to automatically join a Wi-Fi subscriber service whenever the user enters a Hotspot 2.0 area, in order to provide better bandwidth and services-on-demand to end-users, while also alleviating mobile carrier infrastructure of traffic overheads."

How does this standard deal with issues like user privacy, rogue hotspots, etc.?

PassPoint uses 802.1x and client certificates/PKI to authenticate. I have the Boingo Wi-Fi service client cert installed on my iPhone and it automatically connects to any -Passpoint network via a WPA2 connection and authenticates with the installed cert. It's really nice for traveling.

Many cities have free WiFi in whole downtown areas, on many streets.

The use case is by now more than fleshed out.

Users connect to it once, and done. It’s cheap, fast, and simple.

You don’t have to worry about falling back to roaming when you walk out of the range of the network, as your phone automatically stops downloading that huge file as soon as WiFi stops.

But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.

> But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.

Actually, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. When I went to Denmark a couple of months ago my phone didn't consider it roaming, since I have a contract where I have the same prices there and at home.

Yes, so the network is marked as "equal to normal". Like O2 and eplus do.

But there’s no way to mark a network as better than normal.

For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue.

If you are on "NYC 4G", and go back to your own 4G network, there’s no way for Android to stop streaming that FLAC song, because it doesn’t know a way to tell that one 4G network is equivalent to WiFi, but another is not.

> For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue.

Since the wi-fi radio is different from the cellular data radio in the phone, it's trivial to set different policies depending on which radio the phone is using. The settings to allow differentiation exist because we know implicitly that a wi-fi connection won't be draining your expensive data plan. The phone doesn't actually look at a connection's bandwidth/signal quality/etc to do this.

Of course. And you can even use the software to tell it that a specific WiFi network is metered.

But you can’t tell it that a 4G network is unmetered.

How would connecting to it work? Seems like a much larger usability barrier than connecting to WiFi.

It's not just sitting-in: take a stroll around NYC late at night and pass a Starbucks—you'll see many people clinging outside to access their WiFi

My phone automatically connects to wifi. An amazing use case is the beach. Sitting on the beach, streaming music on my phone via wifi.

Or using the internet

> Wifi is still not a good WAN (municipal) technology.

Wasn't WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) designed for city-wide use?

i never use public wifi domestically but i always use it when traveling abroad.

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