Barcelona, London, and Beijing free Wi-Fi hotspots
This thesis is about how Barcelona, Beijing, and London set up free Wi-Fi hotspots, focusing on municipal Wi-Fi, to optimize the collection of data in order to answer their needs. The Critical Literature Review sums up several author’s works to give an overview of how public Wi-Fi hotspots work and...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/336104 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/336104 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Wireless communication systems Wireless LANs Comunicació sense fil, Sistemes de Xarxes locals sense fil Wi-Fi Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica |
| Sumario: | This thesis is about how Barcelona, Beijing, and London set up free Wi-Fi hotspots, focusing on municipal Wi-Fi, to optimize the collection of data in order to answer their needs. The Critical Literature Review sums up several author’s works to give an overview of how public Wi-Fi hotspots work and their features, the pros and risks, and how municipal Wi-Fi are set up in the three cities. The second part of the thesis outlines the methods used for collecting data: a questionnaire, two focus group sessions, and an experiment have been conducted. The third part includes the findings and analysis. With the gathered data, it can be concluded that the main reason for a user to connect to a free Wi-Fi hotspot is to save money. However, most users are not aware of the risks when connecting to a public Wi-Fi and do not know how to stay protected. Based on the findings, Barcelona, London, and Beijing hotspots are set up as a Mesh Network. The three cities collect their citizen’s data, and their primary goal is to promote tourism, support businesses, and ameliorate transportation and infrastructure. Beijing collects data more intensively than London and Barcelona. Moreover, municipal Wi-Fi in London and Beijing operate more efficiently than the Barcelona one. The last section ‘Recommendations and Conclusion’ provides suggestions on how municipal Wi-Fi should be set up to be successful by taking location and target groups, business, legal, and technical aspects in consideration. Additionally, it mentions how to improve the user experience and usability of Barcelona Wi-Fi, and how to ameliorate London Wi-Fi, which mostly works flawlessly. Recommendations on how users can protect themselves when connecting to a public Wi-Fi are also stated. Finally, further investigation ideas have been proposed, covering this field of study. Based on my expertise gained from my undergraduate studies in Information Technology and Business Management at UCL (London), I decided to take a rather social approach which still incorporates certain technical aspects that I learned in my Masters in Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at UPC (Barcelona). With that said, due to my interest in this social approach, my Master Thesis is a research and explanatory study rather than a technical report. |
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