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London Is Still World's Wi-Fi Access Point Capital
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:26 AM
from the home-of-the-apostrophe dept.
from the home-of-the-apostrophe dept.
ISP Review UK writes "The latest annual Wireless Security Survey from RSA has revealed that London is still the world's wireless network (Wi-Fi) capital, with a total of 12,276 access points detected, exceeding the number found in New York City by more than 3,000. However, the French capital of Paris broke all the records with a 543% year-over-year increase in the number of wireless access points, which compares with London's 72% (down from 160% last year) and New York City's 45% (down from 49%). The survey also examined how many of the wireless access points detected were secured with some form of encryption (hotspots excluded). In New York City, 97% of corporate access points had encryption in place (76% last year). In Paris, 94% of corporate access points were encrypted — although in London, 20% of all business access points continue to be completely unprotected."
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Submission: London is Still Worlds Wi-Fi Access Point Capital by Anonymous Coward
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well... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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From my place on the 25th floor, using a wrt54gl with stock hardware, I can survey about 2-3 floors up and down, plus APs in 3 hotels, some offices about a KM away and occasionally a WanderingWifi AP at an Arby's about 4KM away (direct LOS). From the pool or the top of the parking garage, I get the facing side of the whole 32 story building.
I'd imagine a more formal survey would employ a directional/dish antenna so all the Linksys/Belkin/Netgear SSIDs on channel 6 wouldn't obscure each other.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know, where I live there are something like 15 access points near me. All of them are encrypted. Doesn't matter how many there are near you if you can't use any of them.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
can't=shouldn't
especially WEP is a joke to crack
Re: (Score:2)
In some places, it is local custom to put a jug (or other container) of water outside for any passerby to get a drink from (it's not considered trespassing or theft). And the courts et all will probably be rather harsh on you if you're caught tainting the water.
Which brings us to the next point- even if the SSID says "FreeWiFi"
Re: (Score:2)
Even if it's unencrypted it doesn't mean you can use them - depends on the laws in your country,
No if its unencrypted (or tbh WEP (or wpa with a popular SSID & weak passphrase)) I defiantly can USE them. is it legal? who cares cannabis is also illegal, its not like your going to get caught stealing some bandwidth from joe blogs (maybe if i overdo it but he will probably reinstall windows several times before even suspecting me)
Secondly there is currently no easy way to _intentionally_ _allow_ "anonymous" public users to use an _encrypted_ WiFi network, in a manner where the users can't successfully decrypt each other's traffic. In theory it is technically possible, but there is no standard to make it _easy_ (well at least as easy as using an https website).
unencrypted connection, followed by a vpn, or secure web proxy Im sure when i had a read of the open router firmware pages, it was looked easy to set up. Although they are b
Fix the title... (Score:2, Insightful)
in London, 20% of all business access points continue to be completely unprotected.
So the title should read "London is still world's Wi-Fi Wardriving Capital", yesno?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If a wardriver chooses to access a network, that remains a different and separate matter. (And not one that's black and white either. How is somebody expected to know what networks are open on purpose for public use? In Seattle there a lot of such networks.)
I myself have long taken the view that if I don't have to do anything more than just associate with access point to be fully conn
Nichtlachen-Keinwortz Syndrome (Score:2)
You've got Nichtlachen-Keinwortz Syndrome, right?
Re: (Score:2)
"Nichtlachen-Keinwortz"? I think they agreed to be taken over last month after getting into trouble with too many bad debts.
Be careful, young man. Mr Bent has no sense of humor about such allegations.
Hard to believe (Score:2)
I found it difficult to find free wifi in London. I always ended up having to pay for it. Boo.
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Not free? Well that sucks. I get to watch 25 channels of high-definition digital television completely-and-totally free, and all I need is an antenna.
>>>a total of 12,276 access points
That's it? That doesn't sound like enough bandwidth to support streaming of 1,000,000 copies of Doctor Who (if broadcast television were ended, leaving only the wireless internet to supply television). I guess we still need the "freeview" broadcast television after all.
-
- posted with Lynx, a Commodore 64 web brows
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow it sounds like someone is pushing an unsolicited agenda in their posts.
Re:Hard to believe (Score:4, Funny)
"posted with Lynx, a Commodore 64 web browser (using 2 kbit/s modem)"
I think that very well could be retro enough to requalify as nerdy. Most nerds go top end new gear but you should get your own categorization. 'Get off my lawn! You are blocking the mules from generating enough power for true AI on the difference engine 3.0.' Ok, maybe a little long for a title but you've obviously worked at it. Where did you even GET a 2kbit modem? Did you have to build it yourself? The rest of your post while just an opinion is kinda flamebaitish just because its blatantly ignorant, i'd rate it Offtopic... then i'd rate my post offtopic too.
Parent
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I was just having a bit of fun with my Commodore - just to see if the web could be accessed with ancient technology. I'm now back on my 3000 megahertz PC. It's just a hobbyist thing; no different than someone who writes Linux code for fun.
- The C64 I've owned since 1987 (purchased just a few months before Star Trek TNG premiered). ;-)
- Ditto the modem which was made by Aprotek.
- And I use an S-video connection so I can play the classic 8-bit games on my 27" television. Or surf the web.
Re: (Score:2)
Awesome, I wish I had some old computer stuff you could really play with. The most soldering you get to do nowadays is to overclock certain computers and often you can use pencil hah. When I was a kid I found a bag of random bits... capacitors and the like, I remember being able to turn the tv to static and shut it off, little things. Nowhere as cool as having computer hardware you could mess with. I think i'm going to go mod my snes so I can use PS controllers (lost the snes ones)...
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Awesome, I wish I had some old computer stuff you could really play with. The most soldering you get to do nowadays is to overclock certain computers and often you can use pencil hah.
Well, to be fair, you can't exactly get inside a Z80 or 6502 and play around with it, can you? It's still a black box.
I remember reading old computer mags my Dad had from the early 1980s, and one of the letters was someone complaining that his Dragon 32 [wikipedia.org] computer was a closed box whose inner workings were relatively opaque. Of course, compared to the early, self-assembled hobbyist computers with their hexadecimal keypads, such computers probably *were* closed consumer devices.
And as I said earlier, a mic
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Access Point != Free hotSpot
London actually has the least HotSpots of the three cities surveyed.
Also the worlds CCTV capital (Score:2, Offtopic)
Orwell would be proud [thisislondon.co.uk]
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At least no one has suggested a system to correlate wireless access point data with the CCTV data, "to better protect against terrorist, etc." This picture of this guy, and this data was sent.
Well, no one has suggested it, yet.
Re:Also the worlds CCTV capital (Score:4, Insightful)
Two are supposedly on traffic lights and therefore may either by traffic cameras or, more likely, those familiar traffic sensors which have cowlings that make them look a bit like CCTV cameras. The author declined to investigate. Two more seem to belong to a conference centre (a private business) although the author didn't bother to look into that, assuming they were there on government edict to monitor Orwell's gardens for some reason.
Of the remaining 28, all the cameras actually identified are private cameras belonging to businesses. Mind you there are also "hundreds of private, remote-controlled security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and offices" which for some reason they decided didn't count towards the 32-camera total the way the other 28 cameras belong to businesses did. I'm not suggesting that those "hundreds" of cameras are figments of the author's imagination, or that they are only mentioned to imply that the preceding 28 cameras were somehow related to the government, even though they clearly aren't, but this is a publication associated with the Daily Mail so I doubt that fact-checking got in the way of sensationalism.
Parent
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this is a publication associated with the Daily Mail so I doubt that fact-checking got in the way of sensationalism.
Isn't the CCTV issue being in the popular press a good thing? If they aren't sensationalising something they aren't reporting it.
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Re: (Score:2)
That's what they always do.
But I did watch Panorama last night, and was surprised that it was on privacy (more data than surveillance).
Misleading: They only went to Paris, London & (Score:5, Interesting)
This press release is really misleading. In the last two years, RSA only surveyed these three cities, no others. So London is the world's wireless capital when they only surveyed NYC, Paris, and London? Not really.
Besides, the gross number of wireless network doesn't tell us much. A per capita figure would have been a more useful comparison. NYC metro has 17 million people, London 8 million and Paris is at 9.6 million. It also looks like they only focused on the city's "financial hubs."
If you read further into the press release, you see this other interesting note, most networks are closed:
Press Release: http://www.rsa.com/press_release.aspx?id=9725 [rsa.com]
Survey Results: http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3268 [rsa.com]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, the gross number of wireless network doesn't tell us much. A per capita figure would have been a more useful comparison. NYC metro has 17 million people, London 8 million and Paris is at 9.6 million. It also looks like they only focused on the city's "financial hubs."
Well, the result would be the same then. More people per access point = bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Was thinking something fishy was going on.
Was in Prague and London this summer and both cities where nicely covered with wifi, however, subjectively the service was much much better in Prague than London - you have to look hard in Prague for a cafe without free wifi. Now the amount of AP's might be higher in London, but travelers/citizens ability to get online seemed quite a bit better in Prague.
Re:Misleading: They only went to Paris, London &am (Score:2)
Where did you get the 9.6 million populaton for Paris?
Last I heard, the official population for Paris was just over 2 million.
Moscow and London have a largest population in Europe (even Istanbul if you want to count that in)
The official city of Paris has 2 million, but the metropolitain area more like 11 million.
London has 7.5 million, and the metropolitain area 13 million.
But going by the 'urban area' Paris has more -- 10.6M rather than 8.3M. The urban area is the population of the region where houses are within 200m of each other. The metropolitain area includes satellite towns (places where most residents work in the main city etc).
Re:Misleading: They only went to Paris, London &am (Score:3, Informative)
And to complicate things further, the City of London has a resident population of 7.8 THOUSAND.
they sure aren't usable... (Score:5, Informative)
I went to NYC in summer and took an iPod Touch. Everywhere I went, there were 2 or 3 networks, often some open, often over 8 networks.
I went to London and Paris last month and took an iPod Touch. I'd open it and usually get no networks at all. It was odd going to a coffee shop and seeing no networks. Sometimes, if you went into them, there'd be a T-Mobile network, but it required you pay.
I ended up getting no real use at all out of the iPod Touch other than the London Underground map I preloaded into it.
London and Paris need to learn of this idea of free WiFi.
London also needs to understand the idea of running their subway all night. It was insane that I had to take a taxi to St. Pancras because the train to Paris was boarding before the tube started running for the day.
Re:they sure aren't usable... (Score:5, Funny)
Who the hell is St. Pancreas, and why did you need to visit him? Is he the patron saint of Endocrine/Digestive Duality? I suppose he could absolve you of alcoholic overindulgence, but St. Liver might be your better bet.
Parent
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WIFI in Paris has boomed because of the proliferation of ADSL services like Free [www.free.fr], Orange [orange.fr], N9uf/SFR [adsl.sfr.fr], Darty [darty.com], Alice [aliceadsl.fr], etc that all include a box that does ADSL, WIFI, telephone & TV. It is now rare to find someone who has ADSL without having an associated WIFI hotspot even when they do not use the WIFI. As all these boxes come configured with WPA PSK, finding open hotspots has gotten extremely rare as it takes someone who knows what they are doi
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London also needs to understand the idea of running their subway all night. It was insane that I had to take a taxi to St. Pancras because the train to Paris was boarding before the tube started running for the day.
Yes, well, the network was built without track redundancy (for all but a negligible part of the network, there's exactly one set of tracks in each direction). It's stupid, and we (Humanity) learnt to do it better in later subways (like New York). That's what you get for being first in the world.
There's not much that could be done about it. I recall seeing a guesstimate price for "fixing" the problem - that is, building an entire secondary network - at US$50 billion. Not exactly in reach.
Back on-topic, I did
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are very few subways that run all night. The New York Subway was build with four tunnels for each line -- at night, only two are needed, so maintenance can be done on the other two. The London Underground only has two tracks for each line, so they have to shut at night for maintenance. It's annoying.
There are lots of night buses, many of them running as often as every 10-15 minutes all night (but if you want to go to outer London it might only be every half hour). They're quite safe to use, and the sa
Re: (Score:2)
Re:they sure aren't usable... (Score:4, Informative)
Slightly OT but the reason they don't is because the geniuses that designed it didn't consider a second backup tunnel. Therefore if they want to do any kind of engineering work (and they do, as the UK loves the idea of running something without maintenance until it spectaculary breaks down) then they have to close the whole tunnel down.
There has been pressure to run the underground later on Friday and Saturday evenings but due to the large amount of work required on the tunnels (see why in paragraph above), this doesn't seem to get off the ground.
Oh, it also means that the slightest break-down or signal failure (of which there are a lot, again see why in paragraph above) then it brings the entire service to a grinding halt. Which is always handy at 8am on a Monday morning.
Finally free public WiFi anywhere in the UK (let alone London) is a rarity. So much so I was rather surprised to find one in Kingston one afternoon.
(Which explains why you don't see many people out with their iPod Touches surfing the web)
Parent
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The law might actually prevent free wifi, here in Denmark for instance you are liable for whatever is going on on the connection, leaving it open intentionally can get you into a lot of trouble. Any cafe running wifi will make damned sure they know who was using the connection at what point (ig. require authentication and most likely creditcards).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets not forget that in all honesty 24 hour tube isn't something people are that interested in, Brian paddock was proposing keeping the tube open all of friday & saturday (or atleast some of the tube), nobody cared much. There are plenty of 24hr buses to get you home between 1-2 and 5-6 (with the tfl.gov plasterd everywhere, aswell as the nightbus maps its not exactly hard to find them either). Ofc 24hr tube would be nice but id rather see money spend elsewhere than maintaining >250 stations open dur
Paris? Not so much (Score:2)
It's true that they are common - up to a point (Score:4, Interesting)
As other posters have noted, the survey was only of three cities.
Even aside from that, for most people it's something of an academic point because unless you have infinite funds and patience you will be constrained to a few networks. Free ones are relatively uncommon.
It can still be useful though - just today I was able to work around a broadband outage in my office in Knightsbridge by buying a day's connection to the local BTOpenZone access point. Mind you, it was irritating that to circumvent a problem with BT's flakey internet I had to buy a service from BT themselves at an extortionate £10 for 24 hours, but still better than no connectivity for a day.
That's it? (Score:4, Informative)
I found more than a thousand wifi networks walking down Oxford street with a PDA this spring, and London only has ~12k wifi networks?
Percentages too many, making hurt brain (Score:3, Funny)
Open Access points? (Score:2)
In London, I can generally only find a few I can use - and mainly only because I have access to the BT ones, in places like Waterloo station
However, Paris is the bee's knees. Every public park has free to use WiFi, and it's simply wonderful. In the summer I lay on the grass working with my laptop, and noticed many local business people doing the
This study brought to you by Linksys (Score:4, Funny)
America's #1 Free Wireless ISP. Nationwide, and now #1 in London too!
Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
From my NYC apartment my laptop picks up 39 wireless networks. If I take it down 40 floors to the street I detect 3.
I can guess where they measured from...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I wanted free WiFi I'm almost certainly on the ground though.
It would be better to measure the number of WiFi spots reachable from public roads and parks, and usable without payment.
Completely unprotected? (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably not true. I'd wager that the lions share of those 'unprotected' APs would just funnel you straight to a VPN login page, with no other access of any kind.
Not what the RSA survey was about (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a briefing from RSA about this survey (writing it up for Ars Technica), and the wardriving that was done was not for the purpose of counting. Rather, it was a subsample of the city: a route that went through business and residential neighborhoods, and that has been driven consistently in London for 4 years. The same route in Paris has been driven for 4 years, and in New York for 7 years.