Starbucks’ WiFi goes Google
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
Google Fiber is a nice business opportunity for them, but that requires infrastructure. This comes with none of that. It's not even a precursor to Google Fiber rollout. Either they are getting a similar-quality leased line to _one_ place, or it's just an ad. And even if the Starbucks uplink is "Google Fiber", the wireless connection itself will be a huge bottleneck, as it always is when you have more than around five devices communicating at once.
They're paying for the increased speeds in exchange for the ad, yes. It seems pretty clear to me that Google wants to brand itself with the word 'fast'. This goes as far back as the original Chrome commercials. I think it's rather smart.
And it's rather peculiar that we all associate AT&T with 'mediocre' thanks to their Starbucks wifi sponsorship.
Source: I was the Wayport CTO.
edit: I said Google acquired Wayport. It was AT&T.
People tend to forget about these indirect effects - changes in habits, behaviours, economies. Anything leading to "more internet" or "more computer" in our lives will, almost certainly, lead to more revenues for Google.
LOL either the real one will be up or someone running a MITM attack.
It is an interesting area that has not been tackled by a startup. I have no idea how they'd tackle it. But it would be nice to know when I connect to some random network if I'm on the real thing or just some spoofed SSID. Yeah yeah connect to your VPN... but another layer of security, or a reduced level of threat, never hurt anything. Maybe a free VPN would be the point of the startup, "Don't trust your internet access? Connect to us!"
Also this would have been a cool place/idea to roll out guaranteed working IPv6 connectivity. This may very well be the case, although unpromoted.
The biggest problem I see is that their is no way to automatically distinguish between a MITM, and the vendor simply not participating.
They could release an ITMS app for iDevices, I suppose.
My relatively new android phone is running 2.3.7, so somehow shoehorning it into an android app would be more useful than adding to a OS I probably won't have access to for years.
Its going to need to be cross platform for the laptop users anyway.
Note that as a startup idea you don't need to be .mil grade and encrypt and verify every packet. Something as simple as a notification pop up along the lines of "Holy Cow you are in Great Danger!" would be more useful than the present nothing.
Another option is to deploy something like secure in band wireless pairing[1] which prevents anyone trying to spoof an access point while you are in range of the existing access point. Essentially, the access point uses transmit/not transmit as an encoding mechanism for secure announcements. Anyone attempting to jam that can't because forging an announcement requires you to not transmit at key points [1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/nabeel/TEP.pdf
Your big mistake was thinking that you should ever trust a network instead of using secure protocols like HTTPS or SSH.
There are quite a few VPN products out there advertised specifically to protect you while connecting to untrusted public WiFi networks.
Will the Google wifi require a login via web browser before given internet access? My phone is always auto-connecting to attwifi but it ends up paralyzing my phone because nothing works until I go to the browser and agree to their terms.
Presumably they do. Sure there are arguments against it, but on the pro side: if people are going to spend a day on their laptop, do you want them buying your drinks every X minutes/hours, or do you want them elsewhere?
Also, to your specific point - when people choose restaurants they often go where there's a crowd (the food must be good here), not to an empty restaurant. The situation is a little different because Starbucks is so pervasive, but don't discount the customer draw of a bustling store full of people.
Over the years just kind of casually observing the placement and layout of the stores, it seems that they are maximized to be easy to access by the morning rush crowds as well as the lunch and after work rushes. Also, a pronounced increase in drive-through locations.
I could imagine that the majority of a location's revenue comes from walk-in/out business during peak times, and the tables could stay full with little rotation all day without appreciable impact on revenue, while solidifying the chain as a go-to "third place", especially for the business class.
Any former employees here to chime in?
So they actually don't mind if you come in and order the cheapest cup of coffee they have, camp on a table all day, and keep coming back to the counter for free refills. They just care that you do it often, and that you minimize their credit card fees when you do it.
Of course, if they know you enough, they'll eventually figure it out by looking at your face.
Only store I had a problem was in Nacogdoches, TX -- somehow, they didn't allow refills -- citing some health law disallowing it , so I guess it can vary by store.
The one store I was treated differently (which was a direct operation store) was little surprising to me, but might have been something to do with bizarre laws in their local jurisdiction, in which case they wouldn't have much choice.
It could have been better if they could accommodate me somehow, though...
"Say hello to my little friend", which neatly encapsulates how I feel about stupid web login screens on wifi and exactly how I feel each time this app bypasses them for me:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.uk.syslynx....
aka "Wifi web login". Can be a bit touchy with some but I've not found one yet that it doesn't eventually work on. Once configured, it just transparently sits in the background, at work, or restaurants, or the library, or pretty much anywhere.
I would imagine there exists an iDevice work-alike.
Fortunately, iOS itself is smart enough to notice when your network has a login page like that, and will display that page on-screen automatically so you can click through it. Not as smooth as that Android app (which I'm now jealous of), but at least things don't invisibly fail until you figure out what's going on.
802.11u is supported today on some Android phones, and has been (yes,publicly) announced for iOS 7.
That's the future, sadly - Italy for one requires you to register with your passport or other ID in order to access free wiki. It's an anti terrorism measure. Every hotel you stay at requires you to sign on individually, in a manner connected to you personally, every single time.
If Starbucks partners with Google it isn't really a play to make the free-loaders more comfortable from an operations standpoint, it is about improving their brand image. Once you know they have faster wifi, it will be one more aspect of the brand that you are drawn to, even if it isn't to use the wifi. It may sound absurd, but I believe this is more of a marketing play than actually improving the customer experience.
"Objectively speaking" about a matter of taste is always improper.
There may be objective qualities that have statistical correlations to people's "good/bad" assessments, but that doesn't stop "good" and "bad" from being subjective.
To me they are like Wendy's. Yeah, not the best, but not bad. I can do better at home or if I know the area... but that's not always the case.
I just wish everyone wouldn't try to taste like Starbucks, now. They can't do it half as well as Starbucks does, so you just get worse everything.
When I travel, I look for Starbucks. It's just the safest bet to know I'm going to get work done that day.
Anyway, I live in NYC and as you said, there are plenty of local coffee shops with awesome coffee (Gregory's, Kaffee 1668, grounded), so I can't complain. But it'd be terrific if Google could support these better coffee shops instead of just following the masses, because they provide a much better experience.
Interestingly, Italians, from what I can tell, are not "coffee snobs" at all. They drink espresso, cappuccino, macchiato, etc... and just expect it to be pretty good, but I've never seen people discuss it much, like you might with wine.
I don't drink the stuff at all, so have no opinion on the quality anywhere.
There are a lot of subtle ways of regulating how long customers stay. In recent years, I've seen Starbucks replace cushy chairs with stools and rigid chairs that most people wouldn't want to spend more than 20 minutes in. I've seen more than a few restaurants block off wall sockets. And music can be effective at dissuading loiterers without them being too aware of it - even innocuous coffeehouse stuff can be fatiguing after so long.
If you remember their business model:
1. Own as many web properties and infrastructure (fiber, etc.) as possible
2. With that, get all the data you can on the user
3. This allows you to build the most precise profiles on users
4. Which in turn leads (besides the benefits for the NSA) to an optimal targeting of their ads (their main cash cow)
5. This leads to the highest margins/cash flow
Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. The infrastructure is primarily there to ensure that folks use the net more overall (and by extension, its services.)
That's not necessarily a bad thing: in return for a service you want to use, you're being shown ads targeted at you. To ensure you consume those services, they're made easy to access.
Starbucks is, from Google's perspective, a major ISP with somewhat poor service that's very concentrated geographically. That last part means it's very cheap to just swoop in and spend the money to solve the problem definitively.
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google has decided that they're losing $BIGNUM from bad connections at Starbucks, and that it'll only cost $BIGNUM/2 to solve it with brute force.
That may be the case mainly in the past. But with technology evolving, I do think it's tempting to go further and extract valuable data from network traffic as well, which in turn can be used to create an even more precise picture of the user.
If I knew with certainty that every Starbucks had a fast and reliable connection, I'd probably patronize them 50-100% more than I currently do. Hell, I'd be on my way out of this hotel in search of a Starbucks right now if I knew that!
Speeding up the wifi at Starbucks seems like it's about a 20% fit with this mission statement. Ie - if this mission statement was really your goal there'd be a LOT more options that Starbucks. Why try and paint this as anything more than a mutually beneficial commercial agreement between two parties?
I think you answered your own question. Why paint less, when you can paint more?
Starbucks and the Barnes and Noble cafes near me both use the same incredibly slow AT&T wifi. The most I can pull down when the place is completely empty is ~ 150kbs, so I'm assuming they have a T1 circuit for internet.
To make it worse, the router they use appears to not do any traffic-shaping at all. So with just one person streaming video or downloading app/OS updates, it becomes excruciatingly slow. It's kind of rude to other guests when you use the wifi to catch up on the last 4 episodes of Breaking Bad or torrent something. There's also the wifi congestion when the store is very busy but what can you do about that?
With that said, I'm curious as to what the up to 10x faster than before means. If they offer a 10/15mbs connection, that would be a huge improvement.
All the independent coffee places in town either offer wifi backed by 20-30mbs cable or 6mbs DSL, so they are much better destinations if you know you're going to need decent internet access. Nothing like running 'bundle install' and after 45 minutes you just pack it up and leave because you're getting dial-up speeds.
The announcement talks about kids doing homework. They are more likely to be in the library or McDonalds than starbucks.
I'm usually logged into ancestry and google docs while I do genealogy stuff with the microfilm machines. Although as more "stuff" goes online over the years, there's less need to use the microfilm machines. I like the historical map collection and the local history reference books. They also have almost a century of phone books, which is interesting.
a) Google gives free access to public libraries in cities that get Google Fiber, and, b) AT&T WiFi services (nee: Wayport) also has McDonalds as a client.
Right?
With this announcement, you can be sure that McDonalds is considering their options. McDonalds competitors may well approach Google, too.
If so, way to go Google.
I assume most people showing up at a Starbucks have smart phones with data plans. So it's probably not for phones, but tablets and laptops. But then I also assume the speed is not that great as the Wifi will be super heavily congested. So you are probably not getting high bandwidth and a lot of stuff will probably be blocked or throttled anyway. Which means most people could probably just tether to their phone and get the same performance.
So then it's for a) those people who can't tether or b) those who can't be bothered tethering?
These days I've virtually stopped using any kind of free public Wifi because I don't trust the security and my data plan is enough for most of the things I want to do anyway.
Most Android users don't even have the standard tethering options here, as carriers mandate that be removed and replaced with their own tethering apps that enforce this restriction and protect their revenue stream.
And besides that, most users aren't technical enough to understand that you can access the Internet from your laptop through your smartphone.
And besides that, most carriers have limited data plans, so getting lots of work done over a tethered connection is not exactly feasible.
Edit: I'm of course refering to the linked WSJ article. It's of course good that the option exists, but sad that the poor basically has the same access to the internet as someone hit by a hurricane.
Most (if not all) of our public libraries have Wi-Fi, but at any given location you're more likely to be near a Starbucks than a library.
The low-income areas around me don't have a Starbucks, so it doesn't do those kids any good.
Plus its a great way to retain customers; I'm more likely to go to my coffee shop of choice because of the hours I've sat there. Convincing me to 'move' shops needs a drastic measure (like putting Google in their store).
..now if my Starbucks would only have more outlets...
For the rest of us, wifi is far from the bottleneck. I'm currently working from a holiday home in the country where I'm sharing 2Mbps down with 4 other houses.
You must be American. :)
Seriously, most of Europe has had gigabit fiber, flying cars, and robot maids for nearly a decade now and in South Korea they're slowly phasing out the government in favor of a benevolent AI.
I just came back from Singapore, and, between our Corporate Office down in the PSA building, the WiFi at the St. Regis, the various hotspots I had to work with on a client site, tethering to my iPhone, and the 2 mbit/s proxy on the client site - I can tell you I would have paid upwards of $20/day to get a solid 20 mbit/s connection if I could have - I never once saw a sustained connection of > 10mbit/s - my WiFi was never close to being the slowest part of the connection.
At home, living alternatively in Japan and Sweden with 100 MBps connections in apartment buildings (=everyone has their own WiFi access point trying to squeeze in 100 MBit/s of BitTorrent uploads), WiFi is a continual pain in the butt and is often hampering my download speeds. I can't wait for 802.11ac, but I just got this fully-decked-out laptop last year and am not looking forward to spending another $3000
You're comparing a coffee shop with 10-30 people in it to a conference with 5,000 people in attendance?
Maybe it is just because most people haven't upgraded yet, but I have a 4G connection over 90% of the time on my phone (with good latency) and I can't remember a speed test under 10 Mbps down (20-40 typical). It's good enough that it takes my home WiFi (backed 200 Mbps fiber) working near-perfectly on the 5GHz band to beat it.
I look forward to seeing how this new competition begins driving Comcast and the other larger services to improve. In SF, if I had the choice to switch from Comcast to any other company that could offer similar speeds I would. Seems like Google Fiber makes Comcast and ATT's speeds look laughable.
Blaming Starbucks for a broken tax regime where the government bends over backwards to create obliging tax rates and structures for big companies is dumb.
I guess being cynical is understandable but you shouldn't over do it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/google...
Just not the ones on HN.
UK:Note mobile coverage is generally very good in UK but there are surprising dead spots, especially in 60s vintage office buildings.