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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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