Accidental Light

I was going to return to the subject of risk but as so often happens synchronicity stepped in.

Being now the very proud owner (no owner, that is the wrong word, friend is better) of an iPod Touch hooked into The Cloud WiFi I am in a position to comment on how this works. Firstly, in a hotspot it works beyond expectations. Secondly, the gap between hotspots even in the City can be quite large meaning you cannot walk and browse at the same time. This is immensely frustrating.

On the bus on the way home from Covent Garden last night I had the WiFi sniffer open and in that entire journey I do not believe there was one instance when less than four WiFi networks were visible. In many areas we were beyond 20 visible. Of course, now people are more mature in their use of WiFi all of these networks are locked and, moreover, even if they were not I am not convinced one can hop between them (I may be wrong, of course). There were, though, a number of open wireless networks all marked BTOpenZone. And also interestingly a few marked “BTOpenZone Beta”.

Which brings us nicely to this artice I saw this morning: BT Links Up With FON:

Britain’s top fixed-line carrier BT Group Plc on Thursday teamed up with Wi-Fi crusader FON in a deal to allow more than three million UK broadband customers to use hundreds of thousands of hotspots for free

Now, this is very interesting. I have looked at and thought about FON before - the model is excellent but I was concerned that the model could not reach any sort of critical mass. Below this critical mass it would essentially, even though an excellent idea, wither and die. Could this link with BTOpenZone bring FON closer to critical mass? I think it could.

For anyone not conversant with the concept it basically means (if the model was universally adopted) that I could travel on the bus from Covent Garden to home hopping from WiFi hotspot to Wifi hotspot all open to me and in a universal model to everyone). Theoretically it means one city-wide, universal WiFi network comprised of essentially independent hotspots.

(Actually, I am not sure if you can switch seamlessly between hotspots - but that should be simple enough to fix, shouldn’t it)

I’ve meaning to get one of these puppies for a long time and with the family away in New Zealand I grabbed the opportunity to buy a Slingbox.

I guess you all know about Slingbox but for those of you who have been sleeping under rocks it streams your media from home out onto the interweb allowing you to watch and control, for example, your television from anywhere in the world with interweb connection. The first box I bought had some sort of problem with the network card which I only figured out after a long hard day trying to get the thing to work: for once, it wasn’t me not bright enough to set it up - the darn thing was indeed faulty.

The second box worked like a dream - extremely easy to set up (although remember I had spent all of Sunday learning about it). I think the only issue for Joe Blow would be configuring the router to open a port for the streaming.

Works beautifully over wireless in the house (sustains an excellent picture even at the bottom of the garden where the wireless is tailing off) and a friend tested it from his house and ended up watching an episode of Life On Mars recorded on the SKY HD box. So the quality is better than: “Wow, really good that it works so well” and more “What shall we watch”.

Off to Malaysia tomorrow - hopefully the hotel will have wireless
Apropos nothing I leave you with a quote from Life On Mars from the genius that is DCI Gene Hunt:

She’s as nervous as a small nun at a penguin shoot.