There’s two articles in today’s Honolulu newspapers about local Internet usage.
An article in the Honolulu Advertiser’s business section reports that Honolulu residents tend to spend more time on the Internet than the average US Internet user.
Oceanic Time Warner’s Road Runner cable modem service recently celebrated its 10th anniversary in Honolulu. The company reports that Honolulu is one of its most mature markets, with 220,000 customers. Many customers use residential broadband service to work from home.
Meanwhile, the lead story in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s business section examined the coffee shop office. At the bottom of the article, there’s a nice set of netiquette tips for public WiFi users. One major item in this list – people who buy little or nothing from a coffee shop while they use the free WiFi. Squatters beware!
Sadly, there wasn’t a single meaningful mention of security and privacy issues in either article. I recommend that anyone who uses their computer in a public place buy and use a privacy filter. This is a thin piece of polarized plastic that completely covers the screen. The filter restricts the viewing angle, making it difficult for anyone but the user to read the screen. 3M has a nice selection of filters that will fit most laptops. The Gadgeteer has a good review here.
The next two pictures demonstrate how a privacy filter works, by comparing a bare screen on the left with the filtered screen on the right.
More public WiFi services are offering encrypted sessions, but it’s a good idea to use a VPN (virtual private network) to encrypt traffic. For companies whose employees tend to use public WiFi, a VPN is an easy expense to justify. Residential users can also set up their own VPN with a router, open source software or web-based services like GoToMyPC.
This article mentioned Kokua Wireless, a free municipal WiFi service that covers my office building in downtown Honolulu. Kokua’s coverage of downtown Honolulu is quite good, as shown in this screen shot from their mapping application.
Residential broadband providers have joined the battle for customer loyalty. Road Runner has Speed Zone, its own public WiFi network for its residential and business customers. Hawaiian Telcom partnered with Skywave to offer HT Spots, its own attempt at satisfying this key success factor. Users must have be a broadband subscriber to use these either of these services.
In the last few months, I’ve noticed more people around town using mobile data cards from Sprint, AT&T and Clearwire. These devices are more expensive and more secure than some public WiFi connections. Both HawTel and Oceanic offer encrypted public WiFi connections, of course.
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