I get asked this question a lot, in regards to Whisher, the startup I’m the CTO at: “why is your software based solution better than a dedicated, purpose-made router like the Fonera?” I believe software based has many advantages that offset the perceived advantages of a dedicated box.
Reality check
Right now, there probability of finding a purposely shared WiFi hotspot is close to zero, as evidenced in the recent poll run by Martin Varsavsky, where the top reason for people to stop sharing was the lack of sufficient roaming. This poll was really surprising as he says (and I quote) “Dime que piensas porque es un tema que realmente no entiendo bien”, or translated, “Tell me what you think because this is a topic that I really don’t understand well”. For the CEO of a company that has received over $53 million in funding, it seems a shocking thing to ask. It may be time for a quick trip to the office in between conferences to find out what is going on.
One comment caught my eye, which mentioned that what is the point of having your Internet connection shared for 99.999% of the time, if you would only get roaming elsewhere 0.00001% of the time. Today, the reality is that if you want reliable WiFi, you go to a hotel or a coffee shop where you know you will have a decent connection. The penetration of free shared WiFi must be an order of magnitude larger than what it is today to really start making an impact.
Before Whisher with WiFi Out, this was completely true. You would share your WiFi, and then either sit patiently waiting for someone to connect, or try in vain to find another shared signal. WiFi Out fixes this problem, not for free of course, but by giving users a cheaper access at locations that are well placed and easily accessible, such as hotels, coffee shops and airports. Since it is a pre-paid credit and charged by the minute, you only pay what you use, and carry on the unused minutes over the next months.
Hardware based WiFi sharing
The most publicized, hardware based WiFi sharing solution today is Fon, which sells a small router with a customized firmware based on open-source OpenWRT, and which creates two SSIDs, one encrypted, for use by the owner of the router, and one open, for use by visitors. The theory goes that the separation of traffic makes the owner safer, by firewalling the visitors from the internal network of the owner. In any case, the visitor is not protected from passive sniffing of the public signal, as it is not encrypted, and available for anyone to see without the need to even connect to it – contrary to what Fon claims.
To share your WiFi using such a custom-made router, you must first buy it for $64.30, install, and configure it. This may sound easy, but network devices such as routers are hardly plug-and-play, and in many cases, require from the help of a techie friend or support from the provider. Problems like MAC address cloning, disabled DHCP or DNS forwarding can all get in the way of the sharer, causing him to simply give up and put the router back in its box.
If you get the router up and running, you must then keep it switched on at all times, or you lose roaming privileges. Knowing if your router is actually online is not as easy: even though the router looks OK, Fon’s servers could not be receiving the router’s heartbeat. In this case, you would not have roaming rights and you would not know about it. Fon recently started emailing users who were detected as having offline routers, but relying on an email for this is not what I would consider reliable – nothing beats a big red blinking LED to signal trouble. Mine has been offline for a while now, and I never got an email.
Finally, the factor which in my opinion is the primary cause of people stopping sharing with hardware-based solutions is that the router going offline permanently does not affect their lives one single bit. The roaming possibilities are so small that are not a decisive factor, and if they just unplug the router, they will still be able to surf the web, check their email, or download content, using their existing ISP-provided or bought broadband WiFi router!. In other words, there is zero incentive to share or not share, other than the feeling that you are contributing something to the rest of the world, and in any case, sharing costs you extra money (not a lot, but more than if you unplug the router and it stops using electricity!).
Software based WiFi sharing
The best known software based solution for WiFi sharing is Whisher. So far, we have gone through three iterations of the concept to find both the right feature set that makes it attractive to users, and that offers an incentive for users to share. If your existing WiFi router already works fine, why not share that instead of buying an extra box that may not even work at all?
When we first launched Whisher, we believed many features in a simple, good-looking client would be best, tying WiFi access to social features such as IM, file exchange and geolocation. During the first eight months after the launch, we learned that these features were neither well understood, nor considered a strong enough benefit to drive users to massively adopt WiFi sharing. Even so, we managed to get a sizable amount of registered and tagged access points, around the 80k mark.
As confirmed by Martin’s poll, we then aimed in the right direction: roaming. How could we both give Whisher users a better roaming footprint, while solving the WiFi sharing incentive chicken-and-egg issue? The answer was WiFi Out, a universal WiFi currency that can be earned and exchanged by giving and using WiFi. By sharing WiFi, you will earn WiFi Out credit, which you can then use to get cheaper access at premium locations with which we have negotiated roaming agreements. Very soon you will see a new setting on your shared WiFi hotspots that will enable you to earn WiFi Out credit by sharing and having others connect to them.
The second large problem, usability, has been resolved by turning Whisher into a plugin rather than a standalone client, integrating its features into the existing operating system’s WiFi manager. The result is that if you install Whisher, you will not notice its presence during your normal use of wireless connections, and when you find either shared or premium WiFi signals, all it takes to connect is the same as with normal networks – one click. Many features have been moved to the web, so you can now manage all your shared WiFi from a central location wherever you are located, all you need is a web browser. Sharing or tagging a network is also done on the web, with a single click on the Whisher plugin. Here is what the Windows version looks like:
Finally, what I believe is truly the largest cause of people stopping their sharing, that it does not affect them one bit – is also solved, because sharing with Whisher works with whatever WiFi equipment you already have, be it the broadband router or modem your ISP gave you, or an off-the-shelf access point bought at the store. There is no need to toy with settings or configurations – one click, and you are sharing. And since the signal you use to normally access the Internet is the one also being shared, you are more likely to keep it on 24/7 without having any extra impact or cost.
What about security?
This is a subtopic that usually crops up once I explain why software based WiFi sharing is better in my opinion. How secure is it? While it is true that visitors have access to your internal network, the likelihood that they will be there to access information on it is very low. You are thousands of times more likely to catch a virus or trojan while browsing the Internet or checking email that having someone connect to your WiFi and do something. If you don’t handle particularly sensitive information, you probably are OK with just sharing your WiFi and not worry, but if you are more security-conscious, there are some things you can do to protect yourself, such as firewalling the range of IPs given by the router’s DHCP server to visitors. I feel vindicated by one of the leading experts in security, Bruce Scheiner, who writes in his blog:
Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people — and attracts the most criticism — is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.
Is there a risk of someone doing something bad while connected to your network? Yes, but as Scheiner says, it’s as likely as you being hit by an asteroid. In any case, anyone connecting must have previously registered an account with Whisher, since there is no other way to get access to your encrypted network. Thus, if push came to shove, you could identify potential culprits.
Another feature Whisher has to safeguard you is Private Mode – simply enable this while connected to your network with Whisher, or from the web-based My Account section, and all visitors will be disconnected, leaving the network to yourself. We will implement schedule-based sharing soon, which will enable you to specify at which times during the day your WiFi is shared or not.
From a visitor’s point of view, Whisher is more secure than connecting to the unencrypted signal of a hardware based solution, as every other visitor connected must have a Whisher user account, and so they could eventually be identified in the unlikely event something bad were to happen.
Keep in mind we are reducing the attractiveness of your network to attackers by giving you the power of deciding when you are sharing or not, identifying those that do connect, and making passive sniffing of traffic anonymously not possible, all while keeping your network encrypted. As Scheiner observes, “I can count five open wireless networks in coffee shops within a mile of my house, and any potential spammer is far more likely to sit in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a scone than in a cold car outside my house”.
And bandwidth hogs?
The Private Mode functionality solves this issue by enabling you to have the network to yourself with a single click. Bandwidth throttling in hardware is hard to do, and can even cause undesirable side effects, as the small, not-so-powerful router’s CPU has to keep track of all inbound and outbound connections. Besides, it’s fine to say “Give 512kbps from my 3Mbps to visitors”, but how much do you need to give up from your much slower upload (as most broadband connections are asymmetric) to make the visitor’s connection usable? It’s much easier to say “Make the WiFi all mine now”, or “allow only two visitors”.
So what do you think? Is software better than hardware? You are welcome to comment! If I managed to convince you, download Whisher now and start sharing in minutes – if I didn’t, it will take you at least a couple of weeks for the box to arrive once you have paid for it.
