After I finished teaching class today (yes, this semester I am teaching class which is the How and Why of Computing) in Sidney Smith Hall, I decided to try to connect to Toronto Hydro Telecom OneZone (the Wi-Fi network created by Toronto Hydro Telecom). I already detected this connection when I gave my first lecture for the class, so naturally, I was curious and intrigued as to the performance of OneZone. Many of you have probably heard about OneZone, the initiative by Toronto Hydro Telecom to blanket Wi-Fi in downtown Toronto, I wrote about this in a post on my blog. Just a note to Google, I was trying to find the post to OneZone that I posted last year, and I had to use "toronto hydro telecom gadgetman" in the Google search, because the Google Blog search on my blog did not work! Anyways, the OneZone service is free until March, after that it will be on a subscription basis. I'm disappointed to hear that, as I think the Wi-Fi should be free, like they have in San Francisco and in Mountain View (where the Wi-Fi is provided for free by Google).
So, I was determined to try out this OneZone. I've heard people from TorCamp say that the Wi-Fi coverage from OneZone is spotty, some have been able to get excellent connection, and others have not and have gotten really poor performance. Well, I'm one of those people to join the poor performance club, the TorCamp folks asked people to report and give evidence on their experiences with OneZone. I'm going to do that here on this post.
Once I got connected to OneZone through my wireless internet connection on Windows XP, the web browser redirected "http://www.google.com" to the Toronto Hydro Telecom local web page as seen below, but I had to wait for about 1-2 minutes before I could see the completely loaded page. So, I was waiting for the home page with the screen below:
And then, I had to register to login, by clicking on the link to do that. You register with your cell phone number and then Toronto Hydro Telecom sends you an SMS message with your username and password. But I had to wait before the SMS was successfully sent as shown below:
After 1 minute, then I finally got the message that the SMS was sent:
OK, great! Now the SMS is sent and I got it on my cell phone, opened it up and proceeded to put my username and password into the web site and then I got connected:
After each of these operations, I took screen shots so that I could write a blog post using the OneZone Wi-Fi service and document my experience. But that wasn't the case, as it was SO SLOW, as almost two minutes passed after I got connected:
Four to five minutes then passed, I still was waiting to get to the Blogger web site so I could blog:
Then finally after a total of maybe 6-7 minutes, I was able to get the Blogger page:
But I just got fed up, after spending almost 10 minutes just to get to the Blogger site, then I decided to write the blog about my experience later. So I'm doing that right now.
I don't know if it's because I'm inside a building that OneZone is slow (and that maybe the case), but so far I'm not impressed. I also can't get OneZone connection while at Union Station. You can check if your building is under OneZone Wi-Fi coverage by entering your street address. There is also a Wi-Fi coverage map. Anybody know what the red and yellow colours mean? Do they refer to signal strength? I'm curious to know if anyone has done any war driving and mapped the actual signal strength coverage and connectivity of OneZone around downtown Toronto, that would be an actual cool thing to do. Maybe one of U of T's grad students doing studies with Wi-Fi fingerprinting could do something like that.
On Technorati: OneZone, Toronto Hydro Telecom
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