a telling comment from Rod Drury:
I also noticed that iPhone behavior changes once you move from the carrier network to wifi. Almost everywhere we stopped there was free wifi. As soon as the iPhone user had free wifi then the iPhone was out and being used in conversation.
When I travel in the USA I don’t need a mobile internet solution – just the built in Wifi capability of my mac. Cafes, hotel and similar businesses offer it for free, and in residential areas there are any number of unlocked nodes.
It has been like this for years now.
Back here in NZ and Australia, with our data caps and absurd pricing, we are still years behind. Sure we have high speed mobile data, but at stupid rates, requiring expensive devices, and with crippling international roaming fees.
We need to embrace free wifi, and it starts with our own setup at home.
Thought about unlocking the AP at home but wont for several reasons. 1) We live in an apartment block and our AP is visible to at least 6 other apartments, many of which appear to have Woosh modems attached to their windows (Yuck) so I am sure they would LOVE to take advantage of our 7Mbit DSL connection (And soon to be more as soon as they activate the ADSL2+ profile on the ISAM’s int he Courtney Place Xchange) rather than their 1Mbit (At best) Woosh connection. 2) We currently pay $1.02 per GB of Data, which isn’t too bad until my neigbour starts torrenting every night for a month and I end up with an $500, or more bill. We have tried one of the ‘Unlimited’ plans when we could get them but the data was horribly shaped, and the ‘fair use’ policy meant that they were actually quite limited anyway. Changed back to a regular plan (And to a better ISP) once we started using VoIP.
If I can get unlimited, unshaped data with no ‘Fair Use’ policy on an ADSL2+ connection, at a reasonable price, I will happily open up my AP.