The development of the Internet: from a reduced dial-up to free WiFi

Once the Internet got into one floppy

We are all witnesses and participants in the rapid development of this global phenomenon. It is surprising that almost everyone can remember the moment in his life when he first encountered him, but he cannot imagine how it is possible to live, study, work or relax without him. I think that many will agree with me - the Internet has become a part of our life. What awaits him ahead? In order to imagine the future, it is necessary to look into the past and compare it with the present.

Recall that it was only two decades ago ... Few people then knew about the Internet, to be more precise - about the Internet, since such a word did not exist in Russian at that time. Despite the fact that for several decades, e-mail technologies, bulletin boards, news groups, chat rooms, etc. have evolved, the Internet has actually been "closed" for ordinary users of the network deployed between American universities and military departments. The Internet itself had no direct influence on the lives of people, and was a purely scientific development with a military bias. There was no question of any mass distribution of the Internet until the advent of low-cost and universal access to the network.

The situation has changed dramatically with the development of dial-up dial-up dial-up remote access, which was the most common at the time. The number of those who had the opportunity to access the Internet began to be measured in tens of millions, and the annual growth rate of the number of new users increased by an order of magnitude and, up to today, is measured in tens of percent annually.

Let's move to the present ... It is possible to say with confidence that TCP / IP , developed in the late 1970s specifically for the Internet, "rules the ball" today. Most of the information in the world is transmitted using this set of protocols. Fiber optic cables entangled the planet, and satellite communication channels won global air supremacy, these two components being the backbone of the world wide web. The vast majority of the world's population is now aware of the existence of the Internet and more than two billion people (according to the Miniwatts Marketing Group agency) use it regularly.
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First, for corporate, and after and for private users, the segment of broadband Internet access has developed. It was inexpensive broadband that changed most types of leisure activities that had never been associated with information technology at all. Watch a movie, listen to music, show the world pictures, play online games, do shopping, chat with friends and relatives, get answers to your questions, look at Earth from a bird's eye view, learn world news or gossip show business, read books, try yourself as a stock trader, meet new people, express your point of view, find classmates and hundreds of other activities can be implemented on the network. The Internet is limitless and difficult to control by anyone and it has a huge impact on the formation of people's worldview. One can argue for a long time about the positive and negative properties of this phenomenon, but one cannot deny the fact that the Internet has become an integral part of the life of modern society.

Tomorrow Today will become yesterday

Now let's try to imagine the future ... With the development of the TCP / IP v.6 protocol , almost any device in the world - a refrigerator or a washing machine, a car alarm or a webcam, a children's toy or a dog collar, can have a unique IP address. Perhaps today it seems superfluous, but a little time will pass and for many of these items completely new services can be invented, which will also firmly enter our lives, like all that the Internet allows us today, something that has been difficult for us recently. imagine.

For the next turn in the development of the Internet, a new type of access is needed, which will be extremely relevant in the near future. The basic need of users will not be megabytes per second and gigabytes per month, but the availability of inexpensive universal wireless Internet access anywhere on Earth. These parameters can determine the trends in the development of Internet technologies and the further spread of the World Wide Web in the next decade. The cost of introducing new Internet technologies and the price of Internet access for the end user will play a crucial role in the further development of the network.

To solve this problem with the use of wired technologies is extremely difficult, first of all - for economic reasons and ease of use. More than a century of experience in the development of modern communications suggests that the most effective way of personal communication is wireless communication. For more than half a century since Heedy Lamarr patented the frequency hopping method, many standards for transmitting data via radio waves in a wide range have been developed. One of the modern and widely used methods of high-speed wireless data transmission today is the WiFi standard, which appeared in 1991.

Freedom of WiFi - in the free use of its capabilities

The standard has several distinct advantages:

1. WiFi is open and supported by all leading manufacturers of wireless networking equipment. The tough competition between them leads to continuous improvement of the quality and technical characteristics of the equipment. Also, due to competition, the cost of technology is reduced, which is conducive to the continuation of mass distribution.

2. WiFi equipment in most countries of the world does not require licensing by regulatory authorities - this contributes to its widespread use. It is rapidly gaining a leading position as a technology for wireless broadband WiFi Internet access.

3. The maximum wireless data transfer rate in WiFi reaches 600 Mbps (802.11n) . Already today, a number of more advanced WiFi standards are being developed, with data transfer rates of up to 1 Gbps (802.11ac) , and this is not the theoretical limit for this technology. Each more advanced version of the WiFi standard is backward compatible with its previous versions.

4. WiFi support today is embedded by default in mobile device processors, and individual chips that fully implement WiFi functions are measured in tens or even millimeters. They are economical in energy consumption and have a low cost. Most wireless devices today support this particular technology.

5. WiFi is supported by almost all stationary operating systems (Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS, etc.) and designed specifically for mobile personal devices (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry, Sony PSP, Palm OS etc.) It allows developers to implement a limitless set of interesting network applications, services, games, etc. for all operating systems.

Summarizing the above features of the WiFi standard, we can conclude that this technology has great chances of gaining a dominant position as the “last mile” for providing mobile users with high-speed WiFi access to the Internet.

However, along with a large number of advantages of this standard, it also has weaknesses:

1. The WiFi standard has a limited range. A typical home WiFi router with an omnidirectional antenna has an average range of about 30 meters indoors and about 100 meters outside.

2. Household appliances, mirrors, reinforced concrete structures, weather phenomena, etc. significantly reduce the range of the wireless WiFi network, as well as the speed of data transmission in the communication channel.

3. To cover significant areas of WiFi Internet, especially in conditions of dense urban development, requires a huge number of access points, the range of which under adverse conditions can be reduced to several tens of meters.

Seven providers have a user without access

Taking into account the weaknesses of WiFi, it can be assumed that no telecom operator can create a global coverage of access to the Internet by WiFi networks that can provide high quality services at minimal prices. Also, it is worth noting significant inconvenience for mobile Internet users. Even the largest WiFi access operators will be able to cover a small area, which means that even within the same country, there will be many such operators. The procedure for registration and authorization for each WiFi access operator may vary. It is inconvenient for the user to register with each new network. Roaming between various carrier-based WiFi networks is difficult, and given the complexity of the operators' settlements when roaming, it turns out to be too expensive and becomes of little interest to most users of wireless Internet access.

Nowadays, a significant imbalance that has arisen in the field of WiFi access attracts much attention. With the affordable price of a WiFi router, many users, both corporate and individuals, are switching to wireless. Most of them have unlimited Internet, but use a communication channel for 10-15% of its potential. If we evaluate private owners of WiFi networks, the percentage of recycling is even lower. At the same time, the owners of mobile devices "see" around themselves a lot of WiFi networks, but most of them are closed. It turns out that hundreds of thousands of WiFi networks are underutilizing a significant part of their potential, while millions of users do not have access to them. This suggests a solution - what if you unite those who can share their wireless network and those who want to use it?

The Internet is of two kinds: for money and for free

The idea of ​​creating a social WiFi network for wireless Internet access is far from new and has been hovering in the heads of enthusiasts for a decade. Dozens of services have been created and are working in this area. The largest and well-established of them FON since 2005 managed to recruit more than 4 million participants. Most of them are concentrated in Europe, due to the fact that the FON itself came from Spain. What he was able to interest millions of its users? First of all, the idea of ​​"mutual free". If a person becomes a distributor of WiFi Internet within the community - all FON access points for him become available and free. Perhaps it is in human nature is shared with their own kind. In addition, as we saw above - the distributor at the same time loses almost nothing. One of the main issues here is security both for those who “open” their WiFi network and for those who use it. The issue of security in FON is reliably resolved at the level of "hardware", each FON router has two subnets - one personal second common, shared with others. The strategy of expanding the territory of influence and attracting new users from FON is quite simple and logical. They make partnerships with the largest telecommunicators in each of the regions and through them carry out marketing and distribution of routers. It would seem that everything is good, the idea works and is confirmed by the market, if not for one question. According to experts, the number of those who use wireless internet these days has already exceeded half a billion people. There is reason to assume that a significant proportion of them connect to the Internet using WiFi technology. Then why in more than 5 years of development FON "mastered" less than 5% of the potential market? The answer, in my opinion, lies in two things. The first is to become a member of FON you need to purchase one of two types of routers offered by the network organizers. And this is at least $ 50 just to try the service. And second, the “free-for-all approach” is socially good, but is devoid of economic sense. For those who travel a little, a situation may arise when the incentive to share will be muted by the reluctance to understand the technical aspects or to buy a mandatory router.

The next WiFi network on which I would like to stay at Boingo . It can rightly be called the FON counterweight, since the majority of users are “overseas” mainly in the USA. And the approach here is American - simple, reliable, cost-effective. About 325.000 access points in the most crowded places. The business model here is significantly different from FON. The organizers of Boingo enter into contracts with the legal. persons owning airports, hotels, waiting rooms, etc. To use any of their spots, you need to be a Boingo customer and pay a monthly fee of $ 10 to $ 59 monthly. Millions of users appreciated the capabilities of this service. One of the weaknesses - the monthly fee is beneficial to pay only to those who often travel around America.

In addition to the major services described above, others are also developing. In this article, they are not considered in detail, but for those who decided to study the issue in more detail - here are some of them: WiFi.com , WeFi , WHOTSPOT , iPASS , Trustive , The Cloud , LinSpot , KeyWiFi . Each service has its own characteristics and advantages, however, few of them have crossed over a million users and are spread throughout the world.

Well where we have Net

We learned briefly about Europe and America, but what about Russia? As one of the possible ways to solve this problem, the creation of the WiFixer Union is proposed . In the CIS, this is the first and so far the only social WiFi network. The concept of WiFixer has a number of significant differences from all similar concepts proposed earlier.

The first and main difference is that the creation of a global network of completely free wireless WiFi access to the Internet is not proposed. In turn, an optimal solution is offered that allows all members of the Union to get the opportunity of high-speed wireless Internet access, or to provide their WiFi network for general use on compensable and mutually beneficial conditions. The second difference of WiFixer from existing concepts is the fact that neither Users nor Agents will be required to buy or pay a monthly fee! Registration in a social network and the software are free. "Exclusive" network devices and special technical knowledge in order to join the social network is not required.

All participants are conditionally divided into Users and Agents. These roles determine which function the Ally implements. Users have the opportunity to join the free WiFi network automatically, as well as to any network that is part of the WiFixer Union, and get access to the global Internet. Agents have the opportunity to provide their WiFi networks for Users, as well as get free Internet access through any WiFi network included in the Union. Each of the participants, having an account in WiFixer, can simultaneously be both a User and an Agent. In order to become a User , it is enough to register and install the WiFixer application . In order to become an Agent , you need to register and configure your WiFi access point with access to the Internet and supporting authentication using the RADIUS protocol.

The ability to create a social network WiFixer efforts of millions of Agents does not require the concentration of financial resources in the hands of several telecom operators and Internet providers. All costs for the implementation, maintenance and maintenance of WiFi networks in the community are distributed among the Agents. Each of the Agents competes in the fight for Users, providing the best quality services for the lowest price. A direct consequence of this will be a significant reduction in the cost of services, the expansion of the coverage areas of WiFi networks, the growth of the audience of mobile users and the emergence of new services that improve our quality of life.

The video below illustrates the essence of the service: .