Tokyo has 20 times as much WiFi as it needs | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo has 20 times as much WiFi as it needs

theregister.com

52 pointsanigbrowl71 comments

I am in Japan and when my mobile net has run out I've had to use public wifi for a day or two and it's not a pretty picture. I find I can barely connect after multiple tries and they drop out frequently, and often have time limits like 20 minutes on them.

Usually I get a sim from the airport vending machine, or for longer trips go to Yodobashi/Bic Camera and get one, you can get 30GB for less than the cost of a month's internet at home.

I don't know how it works on iPhone, but on Android you can easily get a new mac address and get additional 20 minutes. Settings > Developer Options > Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization. Then just forget the network and reconnect.

I don't know how it's managed on your phone, but I get an option per WiFi network on my phone to control whether I use a random MAC address or a my phone's.

Yes, but AFAIK by default (Android) it will use the same random MAC address for each network. I think it is randomly generated based on the SSID, unless you tick the aforementioned option.

iOS has “Private Wi-Fi Address” which I think is the same thing

The feature creates a MAC address for each access point and rotates them after 6 weeks without joining. It would be interesting to collect some of these and see if they have anything in common - same OUI, or from a group of OUIs, or totally random, etc.

> Starting with iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7, your device improves privacy by using a different MAC address for each Wi-Fi network. This unique MAC address is your device's private Wi-Fi address, which it uses for that network only.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211227

So if it takes 6 weeks of wait, I guess this iOS feature isn't very useful for getting 20 minutes extra...

If the backend to their hotspot system uses any kind of fingerprinting scheme, changing the MAC won't help you.

What kind of fingerprinting scheme? I have never seen this on any network.

> Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points – and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they’re reserved for private use

Unsure if you were trying to make a point to debate the article; but it appears they're specifically speaking of private networks, not public.

I guess it's to reaffirm the article. I've also had a similar experience there on how weirdly difficult is to get WiFi access in Tokyo even if you try to pay for it, everything is tied to contracts with the main telcos.

They don't exist in a vacuum, they all pollute the channels with noise. Public ones indubitably perform worse due to all the private ones.

Its the same in all big cities. From my kitchen I can see 23 other access points in the list. I'm sure we could pool our internet & wifi if we could coordinate, but coordination is too hard.

Given how saturated the spectrum is, its remarkable how reliable wifi has become. I get occasional dropouts (maybe once or twice a day for a few seconds) but otherwise my connection is rock solid. And this is all over 802.11ac - which is super old at this point.

> And this is all over 802.11ac - which is super old at this point.

Most consumers never upgrade their router, and even if it fails, telcos often send them old and outdated replacements. There's a lot of networks around that are still stuck on older technologies.

True about never upgrading the router, but I really can’t imagine any cable/telco sending out anything older than 802.11ac at this point. Why would they, it’s just going to cause complaints about “you sold me 100mbit but I’m only getting 33 mbits [on my old 802.11n router]!”

Usually the reply is "we sold you 'up to' 100 mbits, on ethernet, sucks to be you" anyway. And the telcos are emptying their stockpile of old crap before they order slightly less outdated models from the lowest bidder.

5GHz doesn’t have the collision problem of 2.4GHz because it weakly propagates through brick and concrete.

It does have the problem of weakly propagating through brick and concrete within your own home. Without a mesh you end up with blind spots even in a medium-sized apartment.

Isn't the difference marginal at best. I swear i read a debunk on this

"when my mobile net has run out"? Are Japanese mobile networks stuck in the 2010s? In Europe unlimited (or at as near as makes no difference) data has become so ubiquitous that public wifi is more or less redundant.

What in the world are you talking about?

Taking a brief look at Airalo, it looks like it'd cost me $4-5 per gigabyte to buy an eSIM. I literally see no unlimited options on Amazon.

Randomly navigating to telekom.de, I see a front page offer of €34.95 monthly for a five gigabyte plan with a 24 month contract term.

orange.fr seems to do a little better with a €16.99 plan for 100 GB but it seems to be a promo rate and also requires an activation fee and a bank account statement, making it useless for tourists. Still, $5 is a lot cheaper than €16.99 even if you could get that rate. For €5 prepaid you get, I shit you not, 20 megabytes of data from Orange. https://boutique.orange.fr/vitrine/rechargements-mobile/mobi...

Wow 20MB isn’t even enough to open Google maps, find a restaurant and navigate to its menu.

Unlimited plans usually throttle you these days too. I have €60 “unlimited” from orange.lu and after 250GB it throttles to 250kbps. At this speed hacker news is usable but not much else is. It’s €20 to add another 100GB. While waiting months for home internet to be installed I tethered to this and between WFH, gaming and streaming I usually had to top up 1-2 times per month.

Prepay is generally a better deal in UK and Ireland and often includes unlimited internet for about €20. Here is an example from Vodafone (not the cheapest by any means): https://n.vodafone.ie/shop/pay-as-you-go-plans.html €25 per month gets you unlimited data in Ireland and up to 30Gb in other EU countries including Germany.

I have always thought it a bit odd that users with a monthly contract often pay more than "pay as you go pre-pay" but I think that is because it is mainly business and older people who opt for a monthly contract.

Did you really point out a plan that has sharply limited data in the EU as some sort of support for your original statement that nobody worries about data in the EU??

So I bought a 16GB 6-month tourist sim, and somehow run it out, probably by drunkenly making video calls / using YouTube without realising I wasn't connected to wifi.

I think there are unlimited or huge (30GB/month) sims available for non-tourists. A lot of households use 4G as their main internet source via a dongle!

The dongles have weekly limits too, I think. I remember staying in an AirBnB that came with a 4G dongle for the guest, but the week's quota had been spent by the previous guest.

I have 60GB a month on my phone, at home we recently switched from a wired 2Gb/unlimited connection to a 5g/unlimited connection. (This is in Japan btw).

There are many options for non-tourists.

> If this all scales, NTT estimates Tokyo won't need to add any more Wi-Fi access points or private 5G cells, even as demand for connectivity increases.

Thus achieving the dream of all telcos: Charging people without delivering any service whatsoever!

The shortened title is misleading.

"Private operator wants to use other people's wifis to offer service in Tokyo" seems to be a more accurate description.

Btw does Japan have multiple cell phone providers or is this NTT a monopoly?

Also, blockchain? This is not the current hype, it should have been AI powered!

> Btw does Japan have multiple cell phone providers or is this NTT a monopoly?

Softbank and KDDI are the biggest competitors afaik, with NTT holding about 50% market share. Big, but not monopoly tier.

Why does this need a blockchain? Fon/BT has been sharing residential WiFi for years without blockchain.

I'm not sure if blockchain is the solution to the problem, but my problem is I want to make sure it is clear that if somebody else is using my residential wifi the traffic can be clearly associated to that user in case they do something in the grey/illegal area.

> Why does this need a blockchain? Fon/BT has been sharing residential WiFi for years without blockchain

The difference is, as per the article, that the Japanese operator wants to re-imburse the WiFi hotspot subscriber. Something which is very much alien to BT's way of thinking.

Of course, whether blockchain is the right way do implement that aspect is a different question, and in terms of implementation I would agree that blockchain is un-necessary. But you know, blockchain bandwagon .....

I really thought we all got off the blockchain bandwagon.

So did I, so did I ... ;(

I still have memories of people like lawyers desperately asking me how they could use blockchain in their practice.

Chuck could have used the blockchain to store the Rosella Drive address so it couldn't be tampered with. (This is only half a joke.)

We did. Anything with blockchain in it is a scam. This year the bandwagon should be AI.

Japan's lagging behind in technology hypes quite a lot.

I suppose for solving the chicken-egg (provider-subscriber) problem, being able to pre-sell the token at a discount or because people believe it will blow up and be a popular way of accessing the internet and highly in demand, it may irrationally be easier to convince the average person to subscribe to your centralised 'blockchain' than to your.. database. A ponzi's sexier than a pre-order.

> I would agree that blockchain is un-necessary.

Blockchain is an easier buzzword to convey than 'Distributed ledger'. Distributed ledgers long predate BTC, but it is one of the things that make a 'blockchain', a 'blockchain'.

They don't require a system with it's own set of tokenomics, decentralization, Proof of work... it will be a centralized distributed ledger for managment and visibility of the network; i.g. a blockchain.

the 'blockchain'

Because this idea is almost 20 years old, but adding "with BLOCKCHAIN" to the pitch deck gets you express entry into the unicorn club

I live in a high-density multi-family apartment block. 300 families in a small space.

There are probably at least 300 SSIDs being broadcast in this area, plus Bluetooth and other noise.

This is a low-income joint, so amenities are comparatively minimal, but there's just no excuse for not forging a deal with one of the local ISPs and having their WiFi/Ethernet to blanket the property, convincing residents to shut their personal ones down in favor of a robust replacement. (I don't know how you do that, but the benefits are obvious.)

In fact, when I moved in, their marketing material blurbed "High-Speed Internet!" but it turned out they just meant that the wiring was present for us to hook it up.

There is already a WAP supplied by my own ISP directly below me, and I can easily, seamlessly move to using it instead of my in-home network, which is great during an electrical storm.

Sorry but at home I would like to connect to my WiFi, with my preferences and access to my local network. The last time I was forced to use a common access point was in my dorm at the university, and even then I bought a small travel router to rebroadcast the AP.

But I do understand what you mean. I guess one thing to do is to set the router to not broadcast at full power, and use 5GHz to limit the range.

My old apartment (built to rent) had a pretty sweet scheme. You connected to a shared WiFi network throughout the building and was put in VLAN 0 with all the other unauthenticated devices, but once you signed in (captive portal) you were bumped in to your own private VLAN and you could only see / connect to your other devices.

The only downside was any device where it wasn't convenient to login to the captive portal had to have its Mac address registered to your account.

But what if you spoof the MAC address?

> convincing residents to shut their personal ones down in favor of a robust replacement.

You would soon be looking at oopsies like mirroring onto someone else’s TV, or a bored teenager hacking into everyone else’s “smart” Internet of Shit devices. WPA2 personal just isn’t secure for shared residential use.

I know it's far from perfect. But there has got to be an answer for it. Because everyone running their own WAP is a massive duplication of resources, it's literally a waste of power citywide, every's got a separate ISP bill, and it's clogging the airwaves, making everyone's reception quite lousy in the process.

Multi-family apartments have communal services on purpose. We have a central A/C chiller. We have communal laundry rooms, not machines in every unit. Our hot water heating is done centrally. We have maintenance men on staff for repairs. Subcontractors serve the entire property through deals with the landlord, not individual units.

I get that people like to customize and trick out their own networks, but we're a community of sysadmins. My neighbors are not, and I'd bet you that misconfiguration is the norm for personally-managed networks. There is a better case for single-family homes doing it, but apartment dwellers should not be running their own ISPs.

the "solution" is most likely that a shared wifi will be good enough for 90% of the people, and the 10% of us that want to do something different will still get to run our own access-points.

the problem i see is the placement of access points so that they can be maintained without entering peoples homes but still reach every room.

What I want for a "High-Speed Internet!" apartment is a wired internet. Just use my own 5GHz or 6GHz AP.

Can anyone explain to me how a decentralised authentication system like this would be more efficient than just using conventional/centralised methods?

It's not, but it would have been more efficient at attracting uncritical press a few years ago. But NTT moves at the speed of the former state telco monopoly it is and that's why this is happening only in 2023.

Isn't it sort of the same question regarding if it would be better to use an open source vs a closed source solution? This way all operators can be sure the profit is shared fairly, it's transparent. However it creates probably unnecessary data redundancy. It could also be pruned after a while.

I’m skeptical that this plan will work. About 15 years ago, SoftBank used to offer public wifi using its customers routers. It was available in many restaurants locally, or you could pay to access all routers. It didn’t connect you to the internet more often than not, and I learned to not even try connecting when I saw a SoftBank sticker in a restaurant. Presumably over time connections had some issue and over time fewer and fewer worked.

More recently I had a WiMAX plan with KDDI. WiMAX worked great and it also came with nationwide wifi access. While this worked in cafes, even at walking speeds leaving it set to automatically connect on my phone would cause my phone not to be connected half the time as it would be continuously joining and leaving wifi networks or occasionally get stuck on a login screen. Again I learned to leave it off.

The free networks from convenience stores and JR work in a pinch but you have to stand still and remember not to set it to automatically connect because the login is not persistent your phone will happily connect which effectively disconnects you from the internet.

Also note that allowable wifi transmission power is lower in Japan than many countries. Between that and congestion you’re lucky to connect 20m from the glass front of store with a router in it, let alone in any other direction.

Congratulations NTT you invented a shitty Freifunk.

Can't help but think this could be done without some Ethereum smart contract. Then again I also get the feeling this project would not get any attention without it.

Isn't BT WiFi something in the UK like this? When someone has a BT router in their home you seem to be able to connect to it via the phone app.

> Isn't BT WiFi something in the UK like this? When someone has a BT router in their home you seem to be able to connect to it via the phone app.

Well, yeah, it is "something like" ... until you get to the part where the Japanese operator talks about financially re-imbursing the homeowner for the unwashed masses using their WiFi.

Greater chances of pigs flying than BT doing that !

The problem with many non-Silicon Valley regions (countries), is that many of them don't understand software technology. Politicians and investors in those countries simply ride the hype wave. If Ethereum/blockchain is a hot topic, they will ask to include that piece of tech.

You can see this in Singapore as well. The government there tried to use Ethereum to verify government documents: https://www.verify.gov.sg/

It's a bad idea. Slow. Much more costly. No benefit. Hard to scale. Downsides to tech flexibility.

Here's original PR article: https://group.ntt/en/newsrelease/2023/04/26/230426a.html

Still I don't know how blockchain useful.

While I love the blockchain-based solution which also probably handles payments (a nice use of crypto instead of many scam projects that give it a bad reputation), if they don't scale on a L2 network scalability will be a huge issue.

It can all be done without blockchain. Blockchain is not needed for anything. Anything built on blockchain is likely to be a grift and a scam.

You must be living in a perfect society with a caring government then.

Good for you.

Rest of the world needs blockchain.

> should be shared with blockchain

No, this is not finally a use case for blockchains.

(before any zealot goes "AHA!", obviously I mean a distributed trust blockchain, not e.g. git)

git does not use a blockchain

Not in a way that is relevant, I agree. But if you squint enough then it's an "immutable" ledger that appends and uses signatures.

Blockchain zealots often yell out "git" as a success story of blockchain, whenever someone says "blockchain as a solution is yet to find an actual problem to be applied to".

So that's just me trying to avoid a "gotcha!" from people who are talking nonsense.

But it seems there's no way around it. Either I'll get a blockchain zealot replying "what about git!" or if I try to preempt that I get someone sane (like you) replying "git's not that!".

Sigh.

git uses a DAG, not a blockchain at all

I'm not disagreeing.

Blockchain zealots like to play this game of semantics. You should direct your energy on debating semantics towards them instead.

"Not even the mighty power of blockchain can erase all of those issues"

Maybe it's a good thing if journalists are replaced by AI after all...

This is The Register. It’s a British publication and frequently very sarcastic. I am British and I could feel the sarcasm drip off the screen.

The comments carry on with the tone:

> Should be a great way to demonstrate how Blockchain can scale to millions of transactions per hour every morning when the trains arrive.

As an Australian I'm very not British but do share the love for upbeat backhanding.

Yeah, there's a long tradition with a number of British tech pubs to write in a slangy, snarky style. It's probably not to everyone's taste but that's how things are.

The Register is never going to be a cheerleader. They have running jokes about how Apple won’t return their calls because they are too critical. Their tagline is “Biting the hand that feeds IT” and the Vulture logo is quite deliberate. Also the BOFH is possibly their longest running segment!

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