Out of curiosity, what is your reason for using wifi hotspots in today’s world?
Personally, I don’t bother connecting to a wifi network anymore (except when I’m at home or at work) because the mobile network is just so fast and convenient.
Even when abroad, I just buy a local SIM card and use that.
Cellular data networks in many parts of the world deliver incredibly slow speeds. In those places, the hassle of finding and connecting to a WiFi hotspot is often worth it. I'm currently traveling in the Philippines and malls, restaurants and cafes commonly offer WiFi to attract customers, and it works.
Even when the local network is fast, buying a SIM card may not be an option if your phone is locked and under contract, which is very common for US users.
Indeed - this is exactly the challenge we are working on. In future versions I think we will provide more detail on the classifications (e.g. 6 out of 7 users marked this as Free).
Hi all - I'm one of the founders of OpenSignal and wanted to add some technical detail on what we're doing here - It's a V1 (although 4 years in the making!) and would love any feedback.
The source of the Wifi database is our existing app OpenSignal [1] which crowdsources data on the coverage of mobile networks. We also collect data on Wifi hotspots and have since mapped over 500 million of these since 2010. Although we can automatically detect if a password is required to connect, determining if it's free or not is another challenge as there are plenty of non password protected walled-garden hotspots and plenty of (what we consider) free hotspots where you still need to find out the password (e.g. cafes, restaurants etc).
So our algorithm looks at a number of heuristics of each hotspots including (but not limited to):
- Are there clues in the SSID (e.g. does it mention +ve keywords like 'free', 'cafe' or -ve keywords like 'staff', 'private', 'employees' etc).
- Is it part of a wider network that we know more about (e.g. 'ATT-wifi', 'Starbucks-Wifi' etc)
- Do we know what kind of place it is? (e.g. if it's a cafe, is it more or less likely to be free?)
- Is there a walled-garden behind the hotspot (we attempt some automatic background checking of this similar to the way Android & iOS will do this on new hotspots).
- How many distinct users have we detected connecting to a particular hotspot (If many, is that a sign it's a public place?)
This is just a sample - we look at over 20 different heuristics on each Wifi, none of which are individually conclusive, but together give us a strong indication on whether a Wifi hotspot is free or not.
However, it's unlikely we will ever be able to completely accurately classify free Wifi through a purely hueristic algorithm which is why with this new app we are asking for user input to help us curate this algorithm. Not only can users help tweak any hotspots that we have classified incorrectly, but we can train our algorithms to be smarter by learning from their input. We believe that this dual approach of an automated algorithm combined with manual curation from the crowd is the best way to solve a problem like this in the long run (not least because we didn't want to provide users with a blank canvas and ask them to classify Wifi without us doing any of the hard work first!).
+1. Here in Portugal we're covered in FON hotspots, thanks to our biggest ISP including it in their routers. Buying a Fonera router was the best $40 I've ever spent - I know have Wifi on almost every populated street of the country.
I'm traveling in Argentina right now, and I downloaded the app before heading out. Then saw this screen: http://i.imgur.com/QvaIf0w.png while trying to use it.
... doesn't this defeat the original purpose of the app?
Nice, but isn't it a safety risk to log on a Wifi network you know nothing about ? You should probably warn users not to do any kind of sensitive browsing on it.
Indeed, there are risks involved, but I'd argue that connecting to public Wifi is a pretty common existing habit already. There are good ways to stay protected though whilst doing this e.g. using a VPN.
Totally appreciate this is not something the average user understands. In the long run it would be nice if we could offer VPN style functionality without users actually having to understand what a VPN actually is (e.g. an "Enter secure mode" button, but that's a longer term feature.
1. Maybe you've used up all your gigabytes. It happens.
2. Maybe you're a foreigner in the land without a local SIM card. Nobody data roams, except business travellers who don't give a shit about their employer.
3. Maybe your carrier signal is unavailable, or they're experiencing issues on that day; it happens.
4. Maybe you're in a city, like London, which doesn't have carrier signals in the underground/metro/tube.
There are a number of others building hotspot databases like this but mainly taking a purely automatic, heuristic approach. Our plan is to augment this with an engaged community of users who can help curate the database further in a way that isn't possible through an automated-only approach. See my comment below for more details.
Wifi Sense actually shares credentials with your contacts and vice versa, so you automatically connect to hotspots within your (social) network. Not sure exactly how it handles duplicate SSIDs and things; probably with the heuristics you are talking about.
Personally, I don’t bother connecting to a wifi network anymore (except when I’m at home or at work) because the mobile network is just so fast and convenient.
Even when abroad, I just buy a local SIM card and use that.