Wifi is too fiddly...

I have to travel a fair bit for work and hence waste a bit of time connecting to various wireless networks hotels, offices etc.

If everything goes smoothly then typically the steps are something like this:

1. What's the name of the wireless network?
2. The password is "ASDAHSDknaksdnaskjdnSAdasdasdaslkdj" great thanks.
3. Re type password.
4. Re type password
5. Re type password
6. Connect to wireless.
7. Wait 30 seconds for IP address to be assigned and to get actual internet connection.

More typically in hotels etc you have no security and a web landing page that you have to answer some questions on, so it goes something like this.

1. Find wireless network "AwesomeHotelWifi" "Free Airport Wifi"
2. Open browser and try to go to random page (better not be a https page though).
3. Repeat for ~45 seconds until login page appears. (Or alternatively when you have opened your browser all of your saved tabs have reloaded and gone to the network landing page that doesn't have working redirect after logging in.)
4. Enter details
5. View cheesy ad/sign life away
6. Get disconnected after ten minutes for no apparent reason.

A recent post on BuddeBlog got me thinking that there has to be a better way of connecting to wifi networks that would make them more widely used, trusted and less frustrating. The main idea is a better way of communicating the connection information or rather a method that allows most of the above steps to be automated.

I've seen a couple of applications, like Wifi Joiner, that have basically nailed the connecting to private network problem.  Wifi Joiner lets you create QR codes with network connection information and then others to scan it to connect, no need to enter pesky passwords. While this is a great idea I think to be successful we need to see it expanded initially to other smart phones (I'm looking at you here Apple) and secondly into desktops via a little config utility. In addition, beyond just carrying the bare bones network information it could also contain account details etc so that your login can be personalise and automated. Obviously you would need to have the data on the laptop initially for it to be useful but consider this.

1. You book at a new hotel overseas that has internet over wifi.
2. Hotel sends a confirmation email containing a config file/text string that contains all the information needed to connect to the network.
3. You check in, sit down in your room open your laptop and run the network utility.
4. It connects to the correct network, logs into the access control system and connects you to the internet in one step.

I would also like to see more advanced routing in mobile phones, so that I can go to a dedicated site over wifi connection but maintain the rest of my connections over my mobile data link. Think of the uses, you are in a shopping centre and the store is giving you discounts if you use their app or similar. Or you would like to be able to look at the directory for the centre to find a particular store. In this case the centre would like to provide you access to a certain webpage but nothing else. So you scan a QR code in the store, automagically connect to their network and this adds a route so that you can hit their server over the wifi, but everything else stays on your data connection.

Obviously there are some security implications that need to be worked out for these scenarios and I can't profess to have thought of all the attack vectors and problems with the new approaches. (Now that I work from home I don't have anyone technical to bounce my ideas off before posting.)

Priority Data Access: the one smart pipe feature I want to see now

Mobile carriers, even if they have the best network (e.g. Telstra in Australia), will always at some point suffer from congestion on their network. If you're a Telstra mobile broadband user that spends time in the CBD of either Sydney or Melbourne you may have experienced slow and unreliable data connections whenever you are near one of the (many) Telstra offices, particularly around lunch time. My suspicion is that this is directly caused by the large number of phones in the vicinity that are connecting to the available towers.

I would say that somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90% of my data access is for work, on a mobile plan that is paid for by my employer. This means that I am more than happy to have my employer fork out extra, say $10 a month more to have priority data access on congested nodes. This deviates from the current service offerings of a large number of ISPs that punish users of bandwidth hungry services, such as bit torrent, without giving anyone the ability to easily raise their connection priority above that of other users. Additionally, there is no reward for being a user that doesn't use services such as these.

Further refining this offering you could even pay a lesser amount, say $5 and have the priority access to only a selected number of sites, say your employers domains, thus covering business access as required. This solution would obviously be harder to implement than blanket priority for a given user.

What are your thoughts on this?

Synology and External Drives

I was having trouble with my DS211J taking ages, in the order of 2 days, to backup ~1TB to the external drive (A Samsung Story Station 3). Occasionally it would also fail at some random point and require restarting further prolonging the pain.

Initially when I set-up the external drive I used NTFS thinking that I would want to be able to read it from my Windows PCs. After some digging around on the Synology Forums and finding plenty of posts like this one I decided it was time to reformat the drive to native format (i.e. EXT4).

All I can say is wow, the backups are 4 times as quick now.