End of Free Wi-Fi Coming?

[towhee]

Frater you sound like a wonderful person. More power to you!

 

[towhee]

Frater you sound like a wonderful person. More power to you!

 

[MrNoodly]

Bloomberg could've been more relevant by reporting on the impending loss of net neutrality.

 

[slynne]

I'm not sure I understand why a restaurant or coffee shop would need to have internet to run their business.  And if I owned such a business, I for damn sure wouldn't want my waitresses and dishwashers on the internet on company time.

The internet isn't necessarily for the waitresses or the dishwashers but for the people who do things like buy supplies for the business or maintain the business's websites or social media accounts.

I work for a software company that sells a web based product to bookstores (a common place to find free wifi, btw) and it is very common for those businesses to set up accounts with us for their staff. They do that so their staff can stay up to date on the upcoming titles and also because we have a service where they can get free digital advanced reading copies which is a nice fringe benefit they can offer their employees at no cost to themselves.

 

[Ballenxj]

The internet isn't necessarily for the waitresses or the dishwashers but for the people who do things like buy supplies for the business or maintain the business's websites or social media accounts.

And, if the average Joe or Jill needed to go online and grab a bite at the same time, I would more likely eat somewhere that offered free wifi.
Having said that, I never use free wifi. I understand it's easier to get hacked while using the free wifi.
OTOH, I know people that do, but mostly to watch videos on youtube.

 

[TheKarmaVan]

I imagine that if "Free-Wifi" were to be eliminated they would at least provide some kind of free access to slower networks like 3G and possibly 4G if this 5G talk is true. Access to wifi is a must for many establishments for their own personal use as well as for attracting customers. Even if businesses switched over to cell networks they would surely provide to their customers.

 

[IGBT]

One of the cool things about quantum entanglement communication is that it is faster than light.  This means your text goes back in time.   So if you forget to pick up ice cream on the way home, you can just send a text to your earlier self to remind you to pick it up.

 

[ArtW]

Having said that, I never use free wifi. I understand it's easier to get hacked while using the free wifi.
OTOH, I know people that do, but mostly to watch videos on youtube.

ME! at work, after closing, and i don't watch them, I listen to them, as I work at my physically demanding but mindless job
wouldn't do that on 'my' high speed data

 

[frater secessus]

Art;  if you find yourself listening to YT audio only,  you can extract the audio only.  This results in massively reduced bandwidith.

Here is the main tool for doing it, youtube-dl.  I talk about it a bit here.

 

[ArtW]

I don't see a version of YT dl for android there?
keep in mind I'm pretty backward so far as devices go, I can use a computer, in limited ways, but really know little about them

 

[slynne]

It never occurred to me that people would just listen to YT videos. Wild. Me? I can barely keep up with all the podcasts I subscribe to but the only difference I guess is that the podcasts were always intended to be audio only so you never have a situation where something requires sight to get, i.e. no one saying things like "do it like this...."

At any rate, I imagine that even when it comes to free wifi, we will start seeing improvements in bandwidth which will make watching videos easier for folks if bandwidth is the issue. I guess those who are not watching and just listening for other reasons will still just listen.

 

[frater secessus]

as far as I know it requires a PC to do it. Windows, Mac, or Linux. I should have mentioned that.

 

[ArtW]

Yeah, I listen to a lot of YT 'discussion' channels, no need to see what they're talking about, just a listen
I don't do it at home due to the data required
I could put YT DL on my PC (windows) but still not sure how fast it'd gobble data, I have, nominally 5 or 6 GB high speed per month, then it goes to 2g I think, and even the forums I use don't like that

 

[frater secessus]

You can tell youtube-dl to download the lowest possible quality of audio, which is generally tiny.  I'll do a quick example:  Irene's recent vlog about staying cool in extreme heat at the Colorado river:

Audio only was 4.15MB

[download] Destination: Van_Life_Staying_Cool_In_Extreme_Heat_At_Colorado_River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.m4a
[download] 100% of 4.15MiB in 00:00

Video at lowest resolution was 27.59MB

[download] Destination: Van Life; Staying Cool In Extreme Heat At Colorado River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.mp4
[download] 100% of 27.59MiB in 00:16

Video at default resolution was ~81MB:

[youtube] VPUBfGSA1Vo: Downloading MPD manifest
[dashsegments] Total fragments: 71
[download] Destination: Van Life; Staying Cool In Extreme Heat At Colorado River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.f136.mp4
[download] 100% of 77.85MiB in 00:53
[dashsegments] Total fragments: 38
[download] Destination: Van Life; Staying Cool In Extreme Heat At Colorado River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.f140.m4a
[download] 100% of 4.15MiB in 00:05
[ffmpeg] Merging formats into "Van Life; Staying Cool In Extreme Heat At Colorado River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.mp4"

Findings:

• The audio version was 1/20th the bandwidth of the default video bandwidth.  
• audio was .68MB per minute of listening
• at that rate 1GB would yield 24.5 hours of straight listening.

Because I am a bandwidth miser I post-process audio on a server (remove silence, convert to mono, etc) which reduced the file further before downloading over my connection:

4348442 Mar 22 03:42 Van_Life_Staying_Cool_In_Extreme_Heat_At_Colorado_River-VPUBfGSA1Vo.m4a
 965552 Mar 24 17:14 Van_Life_Staying_Cool_In_Extreme_Heat_At_Colorado_River-VPUBfGSA1Vo-processed.ogg

So now the audio is now 0.16MB/minute, for 106.7 hours of straight listening per GB of bandwidth.

Lots of stuff thrown at the wall there, but the moral of the story is an audio extractor can really save lots of YT bandwidth.  There are also websites that do this, with the tradeoff being less configurability.  When I processed the vid from the linked website the d/l size was 14MB.  A significant decrease from even the smallest video size but still 4x larger than what one can pull out with youtube-dl.

 

[user 37446]

Don't know what this has to do with free wifi but 5G is slowly getting rolled out:

From: 247wallst.com

[font=georgia, arial, sans-serif]The 13 Cities Getting 5G[/font]

[font=Arial, sans-serif][font=Arial, sans-serif]By Paul Ausick[/font] [font=Arial, sans-serif]March 20, 2017 9:15 am EDT[/font][/font]