Tenants Tune Into Free Wi-Fi

from the someone's-getting-it... dept

Wed, May 7th 2003 11:29am — Mike Masnick

Aha! Some people are beginning to get it. Saying they've taken the idea of the free hot spot and turned it into a free "hot building", the owners of an office building in San Diego are offering free WiFi to all tenants. They've realized that WiFi is a differentiating factor that adds tremendous value for users - rather than a direct profit center. The entire building (34 floors) is covered in WiFi, including the 4-level underground garage. Even better, just like Starbucks, the building owners are benefiting directly from the WiFi themselves. They're using it for building management, security cameras, and VoIP-based communication systems.

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3 Comments

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bish, 7 May 2003 @ 5:58pm

is it secure enough?
Weren't kids in 1992 Ford Tauri sniffing WiFi nets just a few months ago? Weren't we hearing all manner of tales of how some networks were just Wide Open, totally insecure and just tools for spammers to hijack so they could turn on the spam firehose?
Someone, quickly, tell me why this is so much more secure and, really, more than a Commons looking for a Tragedy.
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- Mike (profile), 7 May 2003 @ 6:39pm
  
  Re: is it secure enough?
  I *almost* commented on this in the article, but didn't. Yes, security is an issue, but it's no different an issue than setting up a wired network - though, it's easier to access a wireless network. If the network is properly configured, then security becomes much less of an issue.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 May 2003 @ 9:24pm

wireless is probably *not* the way to go on this o
...after all the tenants will do that for themselves and that's what 802.11 was designed for.

If the slum-lord apartment owners are too fscking cheap to wire up the building properly, there's always powerline ethernet.
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