recently many places that used to be open wifi hotspots have become "china mobile hotspots" which are about one million times less useful.

example: starbucks in Beijing used to just be a WEP'd wireless connection, you buy a cup of coffee and they give you the password, allowing you to go online for as long as you want. Now, you go online and are redirected to a horrifically buggy interface that requires you to input a China Mobile cell #, at which pt they will send you the login information as a text msg to your phone. All sorts of whack limitations (4hrs max, if you get d/c'd you can only log back on 3x and you get dc'd frequently...)

It seems to me that this is very likely a decree from the govt, since wifi access tied to phone #'s is much less worrisome to them than anonymous wifi. could just be a money grab by china mobile though. in any case, I would imagine that these municipal spots will also use the phone # verification system, which totally undermines their usefulness.

BT did this a while ago, starting around 2003.

I'm not sure how heavily used they are, though I'd suspect not tremendously.

Lots of smartphone mobile contracts come with free wifi on the big hotspot providers like BT Openzone. I suspect most of their use is phones automatically hopping on to them when their users are walking down busy streets. I doubt they'd still be active if no one used them.

Hong Kong now has free wifi in many government buildings and spaces, including libraries and public parks. So you can sit in a park and connect to the internet fast and for free.

http://www.gov.hk/en/theme/wifi/program/

This is far too forward looking to ever happen in the U.S.

The United States wasn't really setup to have these sort of decrees from the top.

What if a threat to public safety such as a terrorist or drug dealer was to use this service??

How's that any different from a library?

Don't ask me, I was being sarcastic. If I was to continue with that mode, I'd say "We need to close those too, what if a terrorist learned how to operate a screwdriver from a public book??".

"Secondarily, Chinese 3G services (no matter provided by China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom) are still slow and patchy. "

I'm actually impressed by how well 3G works in Shanghai and Suzhou.... I'm using China Telecom and haven't had any problem

Cool, I suppose. However, it doesn't really seem to matter that the wifi hotspot used to be / still is a telephone booth. They could've put the router on anything and achieved the same effect.

It doesn't matter for the users at all, of course. But I'd think that phone booths have a few benefits that makes this a good idea.

For one thing, there's a phone connection right there. I imagine that they would plug into this for the hotspot.

Plus, they don't have to figure out where to put the hotspots: just use the booths, period. It would probably make the deployment simpler and faster.

Also, the overall coverage will most likely not be perfect, so the booths are a visible structure to get close to if your signal is weak (as opposed to try to spot a standalone router for example).

You don't get access to the phone line on anything without paying extra money to put a WiFi router there, especially in high-priced locations in city centers. Reusing phone booths eliminates that cost.

The idea sounds cool, but I doubt it's more wishful thinking: it was pretty clear at least six years ago that mobile is the feature and no major landline operator (actually there was only one that matters before it was “split” into two) spent money building or maintaining those phone booths. The # of photo booths is really negligible in many cities.

This is a great idea and could really compliment 3G networks.