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; McAuley, Derek

Abstract

© 2014 ACM. 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.

Citation

Sathiaseelan, A., Mortier, R., Goulden, M., Greiffenhagen, C., Radenkovic, M., Crowcroft, J., & McAuley, D. (2014). A feasibility study of an in-the-wild experimental public access WiFi network. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development - ACM DEV-5 '14 (33-42). https://doi.org/10.1145/2674377.2674383

• Conference Name: ACM DEV 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Symposium on Computing for Development
• Conference Location: San Jose, California, USA
• Start Date: Dec 5, 2014
• End Date: Dec 6, 2014
• Acceptance Date: Sep 15, 2014
• Publication Date: Dec 6, 2014
• Deposit Date: Oct 7, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 7, 2016
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2014-Dec
• Pages: 33-42
• Book Title: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Symposium on Computing for Development - ACM DEV-5 '14
• ISBN: 9781450329361
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2674377.2674383
• Keywords: free internet, socio-economic, wireless
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/741485
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2674377.2674383
• 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.