Wi-Fi hotspot
The public can use a laptop or other suitable portable device to access the wireless connection (usually Wi-Fi) provided.
New York City introduced a Wi-Fi hotspot kiosk called LinkNYC with the intentions of providing modern technology for the masses as a replacement to a payphone.
[11] Businesses complained they were a homeless magnet and CBS news observed transients with wires connected to the kiosk lingering for an extended period.
[11] Transients/panhandlers were the most frequent users of the kiosk since its installation in early 2016 spurring complaints about public viewing of pornography and masturbation.
[18] The use of a private hotspot to enable other personal devices to access the WAN (usually but not always the Internet) is a form of bridging, and known as tethering.
Manufacturers and firmware creators can enable this functionality in Wi-Fi devices on many Wi-Fi devices, depending upon the capabilities of the hardware, and most modern consumer operating systems, including Android, Apple OS X 10.6 and later,[19] Windows,[20] and Linux[citation needed] include features to support this.
Additionally wireless chipset manufacturers such as Atheros, Broadcom, Intel and others, may add the capability for certain Wi-Fi NICs, usually used in a client role, to also be used for hotspot purposes.
The idea is for mobile devices to automatically join a Wi-Fi subscriber service whenever the user enters a Hotspot 2.0 area, in order to provide better bandwidth and services-on-demand to end-users and relieve carrier infrastructure of some traffic.
[32] In countries where the internet is regulated or freedom of speech more restricted, there may be requirements such as licensing, logging, or recording of user information.
[citation needed] Concerns may also relate to child safety, and social issues such as exposure to objectionable content, protection against cyberbullying and illegal behaviours, and prevention of perpetration of such behaviors by hotspot users themselves.
The Data Retention Directive which required hotspot owners to retain key user statistics for 12 months was annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014.
Public access wireless local area networks (LANs) were first proposed by Henrik Sjoden at the NetWorld+Interop conference in The Moscone Center in San Francisco in August 1993.
The firm was one of the first to sign such public access locations as Starbucks,[34] American Airlines,[35] and Hilton Hotels.
It was then that the term "hotspot" entered the popular vernacular as a reference to a location where a publicly accessible wireless LAN is available.
