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January 4, 2004

Tacoma Civic Network Decides Hotspots a Security Risk

By Glenn Fleishman

Tacoma, Washington, has a tremendously ahead-of-its-time fiber optic link run as a utility by the city, but a hotspot experiment has ended due to concerns over security: The network tested out a hotspot at one location, but decided that for security reasons—and also, but less importantly, lack of projectable revenue—that they’d pull the plug.

As 802.1X and VPNs rise in availability and importance, it may be that security decisions can be wiped away. If you had a preponderance of Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.3 users, who have built-in VPN clients for both IPsec and PPTP as well as secured 802.1X/EAP, then perhaps you could build a business on the notion that you were offering 100-percent locally encrypted connections.

I’ve wondered why hotspots don’t partner with a VPN ASP and simply provide a free account to monthly users or a $1 add-on to pay-as-you-go users to give them permanent (monthly) or disposable (pay-as-you-go) VPN accounts? (Boingo is the only service to offer VPN as just a part of their client.)

Posted by Glennf at January 4, 2004 10:17 AM

Categories: Municipal

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