[wsfii-discuss] wsfii-discuss Digest, Vol 44, Issue 11

[Richard MacKinnon]

Agreed.  We keep lots of stats on usage.  We're about to record our 
two-millionth connection.  It took nearly 4 years to record the first 
million, and just under a year to record the second.  We also have over 
250,000 registered users with confirmed email addresses.  Other stats 
include user demographics (voluntary), time of day, connections per 
user, most popular hotspot, etc.  Also thanks to connection log 
analysis, we have a hotspot recommender that can produce stuff like 
"Users that like this hotspot, also like that hotspot" or "Most popular 
hotspots nearby".  Although this platform was designed to support the 
Austin Wireless City Project, nearly 30% of the traffic now occurs 
outside in 103 other cities and 8 countries.  There's no doubt that 
Austin dominates the network, but the other top 4 countries 
participating are Grenada, UK, Malaysia, and Canada.

We're using WiFiDog firmware if you want to try it out.  The venue 
"service plan" fees ($29 USD) can likely be waived for list members

www.lessnetworks.com
http://www.lessnetworks.com/static/downloadSmartAP_2.html

As for *how* they're using the connections, we don't really know and not 
sure if we should.  For venues that are using our content-filtering 
service, we keep stats on blocked domains (I've learned so much from 
looking at this list! :-)  We also get a pretty good idea of people's 
browser default home page because we redirect them from there to our 
sign-in page.  Beyond that, we stay out of the connection and don't 
monitor/track behavior.  We do know about browser types....lots more 
iphones starting to show up!

--r
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:51:33 -0700
> From: jeff buderer <jeff at onevillagefoundation.org>
> Subject: Re: [wsfii-discuss] [open-hw] I am visiting UK/It will be
> 	nice	to	meet.
> To: Discuss list on the World Summit on Free Information
> 	Infrastructure	<wsfii-discuss at lists.okfn.org>
> Message-ID: <1225284693.7378.138.camel at jefbuder-laptop>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> Good to see that networks are expanding. For me though it is about how
> the wireless is used rather than the quantity of wireless deployed.
>
> Jeff
>
>