A feasibility study of an in-the-wild experimental public access WiFi network

Sathiaseelan, Arjuna, Mortier, Richard, Goulden, Murray, Greiffenhagen, Christian, Radenkovic, Milena, Crowcroft, Jon and McAuley, Derek (2014) A feasibility study of an in-the-wild experimental public access WiFi network. In: Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV-5'14), 5-6 December 2014, San Jose, California, USA.

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Abstract

Universal Internet access has become critical to modern life, leading to many explorations of approaches to increase its availability. In this paper we report on a study of one such approach, PAWS, that seeks to understand the technical and social constraints of providing Internet access, free at the point of use, by sharing existing broadband subscribers' connections. We elaborate the technical and social context of our deployment, a deprived neighbourhood in a medium-sized British city, and discuss the constraints on and resulting architecture of this system, including the authentication and security mechanisms necessary for a service of this kind. We then report on the use of our deployment over a period of seven months from July 2013 to February 2014, including analyses of the performance and usage of the network. Our data show that PAWS is socially and technically feasible and has the potential to provide Internet access economically to many who are currently digitally disenfranchised. However, doing so requires overcoming numerous challenges, both technical and social

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/741485
Additional Information: Published in: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV-5 '14). New York : ACM, 2014. pp. 33-42, ISBN 9781450329361. doi:10.1145/2674377.2674383.
Keywords: free internet, socio-economic, wireless
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Science > School of Computer Science
Identification Number: 10.1145/2674377.2674383
Depositing User: Radenkovic, Milena
Date Deposited: 07 Oct 2016 12:46
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 16:59
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/37408

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