Public Information Technology
The Scenario
Imagine a person entering your town, arriving at your indoor or outdoor event or turning up at your venue.
Increasingly we can expect these people to be carrying an internet capable device. Tourists are becoming more and more reluctant to leave home without their laptop and as the next generation of devices starts to become more popular (spearheaded by the new iPhone) we can expect internet connectivity over the next few years to become as normal as having a mobile phone.
As people are more capable of connecting to the internet, they become just as capable of accessing specialised content-rich and location specific networks.
This could be a results service. At a sporting event, for example, this could consist of a live feed to the latest results. This could include continual updates, live streaming of video content, audio, access to previous performance statistics, indeed anything that could be achieved by a web site and viewed on their browser.
In a town this could consist of a tourist information service where a visitor could obtain telephone directory information, combined with an interactive map, links to the local webcam, a weather report, a what's on guide and so forth.
How does this technology work?
From the point of view of the user, it is incredibly simple. They simply join your wireless network. That's it.
At the point at which they join the wireless network, instead of seeing their normal home page, they will be re-directed to the front page of your information service. At that point they simply start using it as they would any other website. Any attempt to browse other sites (they try to read their Hotmail for example, or try to access Google to search for something) will produce a polite explanation that this service is not available and will direct them back to your information pages.
How does it work?
The technology is called a "walled garden".
When someone joins your network, they are joining a service that is being provided by a wireless router. Instead of doing what wireless routers normally do, which is connect someone to the internet with no constraints, the wireless routers we provide you with are capable of making decisions. These decisions may be based on questions such as:
- is this person trying to access a permitted website (in the case of the services above)
- has this person submitted a valid username and password (in the case of secured networks)
- is there sufficient credit left on their account (in the case of Internet Cafes*)
We can then permit them to use the site they are asking for, re-direct them to another page or ask them for a username and password etc. This means that from the moment they start browsing (or even earlier, the moment their browser tries to load their home page) a user connected to your network is seeing exactly and only what you want them to see.
It may sound complicated. The important thing to remember is that this technology relies on giving people LESS then they get when they connect to the internet. It is a subtractive process. Instead of giving them the whole internet, we give them a small subset of it and then place them on the correct pages to start their use of the facilities.