The Industry Standard: Guest Blog: Esme Vos: What's wrong with Wi-Fi access in Europe

What's wrong with Wi-Fi access in Europe

I've been guilty of dumping on Swisscom Eurospot's lousy Wi-Fi service in Europe (see Cory Doctorow's post) but today I had a really bad experience trying to get access through one of Belgacom's hotspots in Antwerp. The tech support was great - very friendly and sweet, but the process was painful.

First, you have to get one of those scratch cards. The cafe I had lunch in - Cafe Berlin - ran out of them. So I went to an Irish pub on the Groenplaats. They had piles of them. I got one, turned on my laptop and had to call tech support to tweak the settings on Windows XP. Length of time with tech support: 15 minutes (on a mobile phone connection). Then, I found out you need a Belgian mobile phone subscription, although tech support told me to try anyway because it works. Sometimes. Apparently Belgacom has decided that the benefits of Wi-Fi are NOT to be extended to foreigners. Never mind if you happen to be from a neighboring country like France, Germany or the Netherlands. What if you are from the US and your phone does not work here? Screwed.

Next thing is that you get a splash screen, type in the log id on the card, then hope that Belgacom sends you the login password (this occurs via SMS) so you can actually use the network. Unfortunately, I have a Dutch mobile phone. So I had to call tech support again to get the password. They told me sometimes foreign mobile phone owners get the SMS, sometimes not. I can tell you that they don't because I've been online now for over 30 minutes and not one SMS from Belgacom has come in.

Finally I am online and writing this but what a huge pain! Is this nasty Wi-Fi experience common to people who use these operators' hotspots? I am convinced there is a conspiracy among European operators to make Wi-Fi as unpopular as possible in order to get people to use their UMTS services.

Attention cafe owners: don't install Belgacom's hotspot service!

Posted by Esme Vos, July 29, 2004 12:58 PM |

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Belgacom's auth system seems really flawed. This is how things should work :

Wifi settings should be set to Infrastructure mode on SSID "ANY" so it will catch the first available access point signal. If the first available is not the desired operator then manually select the appropriate SSID (If you are in Europe make sure your wifi card is set to channels 1~13. Usually the access points will be set to channels 1, 6 or 11). If you have an 802.11g card and you can force set it to "b", do so : you won't benefit from "g" speeds anyway. Tcp-ip settings for the wifi card should be set to "DHCP automatic". If you have any proxy settings on your navigator : turn those off.

Once correctly associated to the operator's AP any request for a webpage will bring up the operators captive portal page. Now different options :

- Free : it says "Welcome, this access brought to you by bla bla bla, enter your email, agree to our terms, click". Then you get a popup saying you're connected and displays the duration. Sometimes there's a time limit to this free connection. Like 30mn free, then you are disconnected and have to pay to continue. Most of the time you can reconnect for free if you erase all your cookies and change your MAC address (I'm obviously not going into details...).

- Not free : you have to pay a time based fee. Beware : for an hour some operators will count the time after the first login then you're done, the better ones will count login/logout durations and cumulate those into an hour regardless of the time period the hour was used. On the captive portal page you would have a choice of payment options. Here are the most common ones :

* Scratch card, that you can buy nearby (hopefully). Once you have a card, you scratch it (duh)... and you either have a code with a certain number of digits or a login/password. Enter those on the login page and you're set. Usually the single code system is for one time logins (use once and throw it away coz the meter starts counting and once time is over you're screwed) the login/password combination usually allows you to be more flexible with your connection time. THERE SHOULD BE NO SMS INTERACTION WITH THE SCRATCH CARD METHOD.

* Online Credit card payment. Pay online through the captive portal page, you get your code or login/password. Same as above : NO SMS INTERACTION.

* In some cases if you're at a mobile operator's hotspot and you have a mobile phone subscription to that operator, you can have your wifi/gsm/gprs/3g connections on the same bill. Usually you were given a login/password to use (phone number/password). You can also send an SMS or type a code on the phone and you will be given a password by SMS (for example method 1 : SMS to 11014 with keyword "wifi" and get an SMS in return with password. Method 2 : type #1234# and get an SMS in return with password). You are then billed for the time spent online. Wifi roaming agreements have to be in place for this to work seamlessly with customers of a different operator.

That's a quick overview of auth and payment methods on wifi hotspots today. As for the pricing that's another issue...

Posted by: Mark Cabiling on July 30, 2004 05:17 PM