Routers With Location Information
I ran a wireless access point finder on the bus on the way home tonight, travelling the 2.2 miles from Bancroft & Telegraph on UC Berkeley’s campus to Market St. & Stanford Ave. in Emeryville/Oakland near my place. It located 175 access points in those two miles. 61 of the APs (35%) used no encryption. What was interesting about it was that at almost every moment of the trip there were at least two or three active signals.
This made me think, if GPS technology were cheaper and were put into a future generation of wireless routers (which presumably will also have far better range) then even those who wanted to deny access to their bandwidth via WEP could at least broadcast: “I’m located at these coordinates” and then future mobile devices could ping all these routers and triangulate their position too.
I suppose people already have plans to do this using cell phone towers. I was just sort of intrigued by the thought of the general public creating the network rather than the cellular companies. I think one problem with the idea is that if the GPS technology were so cheap that it could go in every router, then it would also be cheap enough to go in whatever mobile device was hoping to do the triangulation.
I guess this brings me back to my original thought, (which I haven’t written about yet): rather than having GPS in the routers, it should just be possible for the user to enter their coordinates and broadcast them. This is basically free, requiring only some know-how on the part of the router owner. (It should be noted that of the 175 APs the SSIDs had often not been changed from their defaults: 36 2WIRExxx, 3 Apple Network xxx, 5 belkin54g, 5 default, 10 linksys, 7 NETGEAR, etc. providing some indication that people just plug them in and don’t do any configuration, and consequently counting against the chances that they’ll enter their latitude and longitude!)
The reason I didn’t mention this first was the opt-in problem but also the abuse problem. A wise guy is sure to claim that his router in Berkeley is actually located in Fiji, so a mechanism for discounting bad data would have to be built into the triangulating technology. I don’t know. There’s potential for something here. Maybe someone can work it out in the comments.
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