WiFi in Australia

Q: What do all these items have in common?
A: They are all wireless internet hotspots

I wrote earlier about how trains in Brisbane are poised to have free wireless internet by 2010. Now it seems as though Brisbane City Council (BCC) buses may be receiving the same treatment.

MX Brisbane reported yesterday (sorry, no online link at the moment) that BCC and CISCO, the networking giant that is responsible for the WiFi available on the CityCat network, are keen to implement a wireless network and real-time bus scheduling service for the bus system using wireless technology and GPS tracking.

This is a move that will be great for all the users of iPhones and other WiFi-enabled mobile devices and laptop users with a great core stability. While you can easily use a laptop on the CityCat or Train, using a laptop on the bus is kinda like trying to perform brain surgery whilst spinning around blindfolded in a tumble-dryer.

At any rate, if this move goes ahead in tandem with the QR train wireless plan, Brisbanites could be looking at having the first fully wireless public transport system in Australia!

Brisbane's next wireless hotspot?

I regularly catch the train between Brisbane and the Gold Coast for work, which is a trip that takes a little over an hour one way. Needless to say, I tend to get a lot of my work done on my laptop between towns. I have a wireless broadband account, but I often don’t get coverage through the Gold Coast half of the trip. This is not surprising considering the train is passing through what is basically farm and swampland – hardly priority areas for a 3G network tower.

Reading the Sunday Mail this weekend however (which is kinda like the Sun-Herald but with less news and more opinions) it looks like the Queensland Government is proposing a solution: free wireless internet access on trains in South-East Queensland.

Here is a link to the online version of the article (The Courier Mail)

For the long and short of it, It seems that Queensland Rail (QR) are installing a comprehensive new wireless system to upgrade the security system for the CityTrain network. This system will be ‘piggybacked’ by commuters (that is a fancy word for us, the plebes), providing wireless internet access at stations and on the trains.

And it will be available in early 2010! I might be biased a little being a guy that runs a wireless hotspot website, but I think this is pretty cool.

A few things to think about though.

How ‘fast’ will the ‘high-speed’ internet access actually be during peak travel times? Most routes a starting to have a distinctive London Tube feel about them during rush-hour. In the event I can actually pull my elbow from my neighbours armpit and reach my laptop – will the network be overly congested?

Also, they mention the network will be ‘firewalled’ against non-commuters outside the stations and lines from accessing the internet. I’ve seen a few comments on the above news story sledging the Minister’s usage of the term. I think they just confused an IT term (not everyone is a network engineer after all). I would say they were talking about authentication and confusing terminology.

They will need some sort of authentication granted, and I believe the most likely solution is using the GO Card system. Every GO Card has a unique ID number. I envision an authentication page will query you for your GO Card ID and, if your GO Card shows you as currently travelling on a train (i.e. you’ve swiped on, but not off), you will be granted access accordingly.

At any rate, I’m interesting to see how this all rolls out.

Last week, Insight on SBS hosted a really interesting forum to debate the compulsory internet filter that has been proposed by Senator Stephen Conroy and the incumbent Australian government.

You can watch the entire SBS broadcast here:

Insight - Blocking the net (click to play)

The proposal aims to introduce a level of compulsory internet filtering at the ISP level throughout the country to deny access to any non peer-2-peer material at has been refused classification by the Classification board or otherwise deemed illegal.

The debate offered by Insight has representation from a number of different camps. The for’s and against’s seem to be fairly evenly balanced in the program which is nice to see.

Representatives included (in a very rough order of appearance):

• Senator Stephen Conroy
• Sue Mclean (Cyber Safety Advisor)
• Colin Jacobs (Electronic Fontiers Australia)
• Mark Newton (ISP Network Engineer - Internode)
• Some Christian guy that spouted rubbish that had nothing to do with the debate
• and parents, both for and against.

Now, to get opinionated, I don’t believe that a compulsory filter is the answer.

I don’t have a wealth of statistics to back up my claim here, but I do have a fairly educated opinion given a high exposure and familiarity to the online medium. And my belief is that for the material they are talking about I would strongly argue that the vast majority of it is distributed through peer-to-peer networks, encrypted channels and by old-fashioned email. And none of these methods would be filtered with the currently proposed scheme.

The end result is that people who are running these illegal material rings will still distribute it amongst themselves, the others who want to access it online will circumvent the filter, leaving the rest of us with a infrastructure-heavy filtering system that is filtering out content that we aren’t even trying to access anyway.

And the bit in bold there is the key thing.

Why put in a compulsory filter to stop people accessing material that they aren’t even going to try to access? Sure, their kids might try to get there or stumble upon it, so in those cases offer an opt-in filter that they can choose to run their connection through. The argument that it will stop those that want to access illegal material from doing so is ridiculous. This is a situation where, if there is a will, there is a way. And in this case, I imagine the ‘way’ would be a 2 minute google search…