City, Tri-Net roll out free WiFi in Chinatown and downtown Honolulu

by billso on Thursday, 4 October 2007

This morning’s Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin reported that Tri-Net Solu­tions has been installing a mesh WiFi net­work in Honolulu’s Chi­na­town. Mayor Mufi Han­ne­mann will make a for­mal announce­ment of the new free wire­less sys­tem at tomorrow’s First Fri­day event, but the net­work is already avail­able. It’s not as fast as other ser­vices in the down­town area, but the city’s ser­vice is free and encrypted.

This project was first announced over a year ago. My first arti­cle on this topic was posted on 26 May, along with a pre­lim­i­nary map of the cov­er­age area. Gor­don Bruce, the city & county’s CIO, says that cov­er­age may expand across down­town. The Star-Bulletin’s map shows sev­eral access loca­tions near HPU, includ­ing Fisher Hawaii on Hotel and Fort Streets, and the Marks Garage. Tri-Net has installed at least 25 inex­pen­sive mesh routers. Local busi­ness and prop­erty own­ers vol­un­teer to host the routers and antennae.

There have been some changes. Hawai­ian Elec­tric and Earth­Link have dropped out of the project. I dis­cussed EarthLink’s recent prob­lems on 27 August and 28 August, and dis­cussed HECO’s plan on 11 June.

The city also revealed that first respon­ders, includ­ing police, fire and other emer­gency ser­vices, have been out­fit­ted with WiFi-equipped devices so that they can use the city’s ser­vice in their jobs.

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Tagged as: Chinatown, EarthLink, free, hardware, Hawaii, HECO, Honolulu, mobile, security, telecom, USA, WiFi

  • ms

    When we think wire­less ser­vices, free often equates to slow. When we think encryp­tion, it too often equates to slower (ver­sus using no encryp­tion at all). Of course encryp­tion speeds are con­tin­gent on the type of algo­rithms imple­mented (sym­met­ric ver­sus asym­met­ric) and the type of hard­ware being used…

    How­ever, after read­ing the arti­cle, what dis­turbs me more is the notion of the city’s “first respon­ders” using this ser­vice dur­ing the first year pilot. My fear is two fold, first the idea of Per­son­ally Iden­ti­fi­able Infor­ma­tion (PII) being broad­cast through a radi­ated media (wire­less) that is cur­rently in a test­ing period. How will Police, Fire, and ambu­lance ser­vices use this ser­vice? Will they inad­ver­tently broad­cast infor­ma­tion about houses being robbed? Or even worse, upload case infor­ma­tion about vic­tims of rape or mur­der? How will we pre­vent crack­ers from using these same wire­less trans­mis­sion lines to back door them­selves into Police and Fire infor­ma­tion systems?

    This brings us into my sec­ond con­cern of secu­rity. How is encr­py­tion defined? What level of encryp­tion is being used? Are we pro­vid­ing secu­rity aware­ness train­ing for our first respon­ders to ensure trans­mis­sion of data is prop­erly secured?

    As end users, we tend to use our com­put­ers for day to day activ­i­ties at work or for school. We may feel com­fort­able using a free, open wire­less net­work for these tasks, but when lives may be at stake, (like in the case of first respon­ders), the city may ques­tion how much they want to incor­po­rate this free sys­tem into the depen­dency of their daily job requirements…

  • http://billso.com billso

    You get what you pay for, and “free” band­width in this case might be no bet­ter than dial-up speeds.

    I’m not sure why the City & County of Hon­olulu is offer­ing WiFi to first respon­ders. I hope there’s a clear set of rea­sons and appro­pri­ate secu­rity measures.

    I would like to know what encryp­tion and pri­vacy mea­sures are being used on the Tri-Net sys­tem. I might walk down the mall to Fisher Hawaii and see what my Mac­Book tells me.

    WEP is not an appro­pri­ate encryp­tion method. It’s far too easy to crack.

    Of course, I can find a few dozen WiFi access points from my office win­dow. Most of these are unen­crypted, and some use the default SSID pro­vided by the router manufacturer.

    Nor is it appro­pri­ate for Tri-Net to snoop the net­work traf­fic for mar­ket­ing or other purposes.

    Google has posted their WiFi net­work pri­vacy pol­icy here.

    It would be inter­est­ing to com­pare the Google pol­icy to the C&C’s policy.

  • AG

    I don’t think the con­cern should be about per­sonal infor­ma­tion being made to first respon­ders via a pub­lic WiFi net­work. I’m more wor­ried about first respon­ders hav­ing to rely on an open WiFi net­work when lives are on the line.

    How do you feel about the chances that emergency-critical infor­ma­tion could be slow get­ting to a first respon­der because someone’s down­load­ing Spi­der­man 3 from Limewire?

  • ms

    No one cares about per­sonal infor­ma­tion being trans­ferred over an open chan­nel until its their own!

  • AG

    Oh don’t get me wrong — I do care…

    I’m just pri­or­i­tiz­ing my wor­ries here :)

    If it’s a life or death sit­u­a­tion, at that point, I’d care more about how fast an ambu­lance would respond than the pos­si­bil­ity of some­one steal­ing my information.

    They’re both 2 bad sce­nar­ios, but to me, the speed of the first respon­der is more crucial.

    Think of it this way… If you’re in an acci­dent, and the fire department/ambulance is too slow to respond, you won’t have to worry about your per­sonal information.

  • ms

    Well, lets give a city a bit more credit and assume that they are not going to replace the cur­rent 911 infra­struc­ture with mesh net pilot. Lets also assume that will throt­tle on the back end peer to peer net­work traf­fick­ing, at least to some extent. Based on the design of a mesh net­work, it is designed for redun­dancy and depend­ing on the type of pro­to­cols used, they may be able to tag par­tic­u­lar traf­fic from first respon­ders for high pri­or­ity. These are all big assump­tions, but options the city should con­sider exploring.

    Cur­rently, HPD uses sprint edge net­work cards or equiv­a­lent in their police vehi­cles. I sus­pect rates are at least $35.00 per month times all the num­ber of police offi­cers equals big money. Piggy back­ing off a free sys­tem may be incen­tive for the city to attempt a cost sav­ings, but may not be a wise move.

    So if you find your­self read­ing this fine blog Mayor Han­ne­mann, think about these issues first before you start allow­ing first respon­ders access to an untrusted pilot network.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Radio rules the roost for first respon­ders, and the C&C has been pour­ing money into its emer­gency radio net­works. Those sys­tems are only get­ting bet­ter, from what I understand.

    Per­haps the mesh WiFi roll­out is merely an exper­i­ment with an addi­tional layer of redundancy.

    Keep in mind that dig­i­tal radio is the wave of the future. It makes sense for the C&C to get some expe­ri­ence with software-based dig­i­tal voice sys­tems ASAP.

  • http://billso.com billso

    Here’s two quick links about dig­i­tal radio sys­tems for police departments.

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