Free Wi-Fi Coming To Japanese Vending Machines 81
cylonlover writes "Free Wi-Fi is on its way to some Japanese vending machines. Working much like a mobile hotspot at your local coffee shop, people located near the machines would be able to connect to the internet for 30 minutes at a time and surf the web. The service is available to anyone, to use with any smartphone, tablet, or computer and does not require the purchase of a drink from the machine."
Excellent Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excellent Idea (Score:5, Funny)
If you need to make money on top of that, throwing in an ad or two should do the trick and keep the service free for anyone.
The required proximity, ToS page and an SSID of "PEPSICOLA" for the AP in the Pepsi machine should do it. ;)
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I would think the commodity cost would subsidize it quite well, but at what cost to the community?
Can you imagine free wifi in dirty panty vending machines? I'm not sure just what might happen exactly, but it is going to be "interesting".
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Overhaul?
You're acting like I am making that shit up. There are dirty panty vending machines right now having money inserted in as we speak.
The Japanese are freaks. Give the Germans a run for their money.
Before anybody gets all butthurt, I say it with the utmost admiration and respect. The Japanese can be pretty damn serious and prurient at times which is paradoxical, but boy, when they decide to get funky and party, they get funky and partaaaay.
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Overhaul?
You're acting like I am making that shit up. There are dirty panty vending machines right now having money inserted in as we speak.
The Japanese are freaks.
This really isn't quite true anymore. It may have been true at one time but it isn't at this point, at least in a legal way. Last time I was there (studied abroad for 6 weeks) I asked about it and did actually look around for any kind of vending machine that had such a product. I was told that there was a law regarding used products that was used to prevent the used panty machines from showing up. I did find a claw machine that had small plastic balls that had new women's panties in them. I suppose if you l
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It's called market research. :D
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We're talking japanese vending machines, so "usedpanties" and "adultvideosforthenight" would be the more obvious choices!
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www.cocacola.com
This domain has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations...
Cisco and Linksys (Score:2)
if you want QoS in your router so other people than the first bandwidth hog can do anything, you will be going to Cisco
True, but doesn't Cisco still make Linksys products that can be flashed with custom firmware supporting QOS such as DD-WRT?
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They won't slurp it all for long if the power is low enough that you have to stand near the machine to get a signal (no chairs, no power sockets). I assume this is a ploy to get people to at least see and be tempted by the machine's product and not for someone 100 meters away who doesn't even realize the open network he's found is from a vending machine.
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It will encourage them to loiter near the machine.
Eventually, the urge to enjoy one of the vendor's products will likely be met by the same machine.
Nobody said it had to be super bandwidth... for a lot of stuff, enough to get email or browse Slashdot is fine.
This is the kind of stuff that I am glad t
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Anyone who has spent time in Japan read this as "Free wifi in Japan" every back alley in the middle of no where has at least two vending machines... It's nuts.
Re:Excellent Idea (Score:5, Funny)
screw that. it could reduce the repair costs on vending machines when if the machine is attacked for swallowing money it turns off the wifi (a pinball tilt switch should do). angry nerds will rush to defend the vending machine to get their wifi back.
tilt all data lost (Score:2)
tilt all data lost
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We all knew that the machines would take charge sooner or later. None of us could imagine that it would come in the form of vending machines dispensing human treats.
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If you need to make money on top of that, throwing in an ad or two should do the trick and keep the service free for anyone.
Ads aren't free. They cost money for the company who places the ad, who then passes the cost on to every one of its customers, with huge amounts of money bled off by the ad middle-men. It's basically an "advertising tax". Currently it works out at about $1000 per head in the US ($300bil total advertising, 300mil population).
I'd much rather spend $1000/year how I want it, rather than on having unwanted ads thrust into my face.
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fail
Not enough free wifi hotspots (Score:1)
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What are you talking about? My botnet business is thriving, not like SOPA or any related government efforts are hindering it or free open wifi will make it easier.
At least (Score:2)
I'm glad such a service is being made available in Japan.
Right now, you can either
- subscribe to a monthly 3G like service and use a small device that acts as a wi-fi server (~4000JPY a month)
- use, for instance, some wi-fi spots in some malls and coffee shops that work only for a given carrier (eg useable only with a SoftBank iPhone)
I'm just surprised that such a neces
Free wifi or Japanese "free" wifi? (Score:4, Informative)
Phone booths (Score:5, Interesting)
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The former telco monopoly in Latvia uses phone-booths. It's just about the perfect solution to both wi-fi coverage and public phone disuse, I'm surprised I haven't seen it anywhere else.
we have that in Scotland and i suppose the rest of the UK too.
a shed load of BT(british telecom) public phone boxes are wifi hotpots. however there is , as stated above some strings
they are bundled with a british telecom or any of their partners packages and a lot of the less technically adept BT DSL subscribers are inwittingly letting other people use their wifi via the BT Fon wifi setting in the BT homehub router.
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I don't think that these 1 Ls ($2) cards are available anymore.
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In Japan, public payphones (with or without booths) have all but disappeared in the past 15 years. It seems that since everyone has a cellphone, nobody uses the public payphones anymore and it is too expensive to maintain. There are some public payphones/booths still at airports and large stations, but they are few and far between.
Also, it seems this is not only a Japanese phenomenon. I visit several Eastern European countries regularly, and the situation there is similar to Japan. There are very few phon
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Sorry to disappoint you but Latvian payphones are disappearing too. There is no real need for them as even tourists can use cell phones. In fact, Latvia has very cheap prepaid plans. One can buy a SIM card for $2 practically from every newspaper stand and use that for calls and data. 3G coverage is practically everywhere and while it is not Wi-Fi speed, it is enough for all practical purposes of mobile use. You can use tethering as well. Or simply use 3G stick (modem).
Lattelecom still sells Wi-Fi access pla
Love it! (Score:3)
Having just come back from a business trip to Tokyo, where as far as I could tell the concept of "public wi-fi" was non-existent, the ability to drop 100 yen into a public vending machine and hit the net would have been great.
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That's because Mobile Internet is half-decent in most places in Japan. You don't bother with public WiFi.
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Vending machines in Japan (Score:3, Informative)
Since Asahi is one of the big players in the market, this could be made into a huge WiFi mesh.
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Great idea (Score:1)
Weird
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Excellent. It'll free up those phone booths for my use.
- Superman
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About time! (Score:1)
Ever since the iPhone launched here (particularly since the 4), network signal has been extremely poor in busy areas, due to overcongestion. Every time I hit a major train station, my phone struggles to regain its signal, and it's impossible to load anything, due to the sheer number of devices being used, since practically every single one of the thousands of commuters waiting on & off the train are using their phones at the same time ( Shinjuku station [wikipedia.org] alone has >3.5M passengers per day, and a single
Isn't this need slowly disappearing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would I need to connect to a wifi hotspot when I have 3G/4G cellular service on my phone? The need for more and more public wifi hotspots is definitely going down as more and more people get smartphones/cellular dongles. Personally I often prefer using my phone's 3G in the city since I don't need to worry about having an unsecured connection to a random router that may be running a transparent proxy collecting my data, I don't need to open my web browser to agree to their terms and it is often faster/mo
Re:Isn't this need slowly disappearing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I need to have an expensive overcrowded spotty 3/4G coverage when there are hotspots every block?
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Providing that you have shaw home service (1.8 million customers compared to 1.3 million customers for their largest competitor Telus) you will be able to log onto to their wifi with no additional charges. Shaw offer internet to 50% of the homes they pass.
With Shaw offering up 100mb/sec connections in my local malls (or what ever high population locations these exist in) wh
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My mobile data plan is limited to 500 MB/month so I'm happy to be able to use a wifi when one is around. Also this is great for people traveling from other countries who do not have a local mobile data plan.
I think this is a great idea.
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As someone living in Tokyo, I can tell you that relying on just 3G/4G is _NOT_ going to give a good user experience, especially not in the areas where the hotspots are likely to be plentiful.
Not saying that the coverage isn't good, it's rather excellent considering the number of people around places like Shinjuku, Shibuya and Tokyo station. Just not something you'd use for watching youtube or anything. (Though listening to music streams usually works nicely for 64kbps)
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As another person living in Tokyo, I can say that I've rarely if ever had issues with the performance of 3G/4G in the Tokyo area.
Granted, if you venture outside of the metropolis you'll likely run into speed decreases.
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"from the exact-change-only dept"?! (Score:2)
Clearly samzenpus has never had the pleasure of using a Japanese vending machine, which 99.99% of the time Just Workâ. Some even happily accept 10,000 yen notes (roughly equivalent to US$100) and give you the correct change.
hrm - in China.... (Score:3)
I don't much like using wifi, and think it'll generally die out in favour of cellular data. However, when visiting foreign places, where my cellular data is super expensive or otherwise impractical (eg Beijing), I do appreciate the many free wifi hotspots available (Starbucks, for example).
A few years ago, the wifi hotspots were all open and so I didn't need to enter any password/etc. These days there seems to be a shift towards having passwords. For Starbucks, for example, it is usually just the store's phone number, which is easy enough. For McDonald's though, the network is open but accessing a web page results in a redirection to a landing page where you have to enter a phone number, to which a username/password is sent which is then used on the web site to open up the network. This latter scheme really sucks - obviously, you need a phone and if you log onto the network but don't go through the procedure, the network is still added to the list of networks to join (at least on all the phones I've used) and I have to go to the effort of deleting it - that's really annoying.
Personally, I think this is a great opportunity for NFC. Current uses I've seen for NFC are making the authorisation of bluetooth exchanges easier; but I think the same principal could be used for wifi SSID/password transfers. Those NFC stickers are very cheap and could be placed very near the checkout so you can just access them when you buy...which is the objective for most places anyway.
Sure, NFC isn't so prolific just yet, but you could do something similar with QR codes, I guess....just needs an app. Hrm, seems like something I could knock up...and I might just do that.
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I don't see either WiFI or Cellular dying out in favour of the other for a long time. Mainly because physically the technologies are so similar to each other that they feed off each other so any advancement in one can usually be applied to the other.
The problem you are seeing is that the WiFi is being used as a "freeish" service. They tried doing it as a free service; but as soon as somebody hit them with a bittorrent (or similar) the performance went into the toilet for everyone else. They needed a zero
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Well, I don't think wifi in general will die out, but just as a way of being connected via phone. I reach this conclusion based on my own usage. I have wifi at home, and at work, but I also have an unlimited celular data plan, and I basically keep it on cellular 'all the time'. The only times I use wifi on my phone are when I have to download something heavy-weight (or, like I mentioned, I don't have the cellular data).
I guess wifi via many hotspots might work ok, but I just don't see too much point - that
Great idea (Score:3)
Prior art with PHS (Score:2)
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in Japan: PHS ("handy phone")
It's been nearly 15 years, and at last I have an answer to WTF that unexplained option on the FFVII menu screen was about. Thank you so much!
Mobile hotspot? (Score:1)
Last time I checked, vending machines aren't particularly portable, so I'm not sure why it's being called a "mobile hotspot."
What a clever advertisement (Score:2)
Hang out in front of our vending machine as long as you like! Free internet!
Fantastic Idea (Score:1)
I've seen something like this before (Score:1)