Show HN: App recommending free Wifi based on hotspot heuristics and crowd-input

So your phone can't connect to the internet at all without wifi? You should get that checked out.

Hi all - I'm one of the founders of OpenSignal and wanted to add some technical detail on what we're doing here - It's a V1 (although 4 years in the making!) and would love any feedback.

The source of the Wifi database is our existing app OpenSignal [1] which crowdsources data on the coverage of mobile networks. We also collect data on Wifi hotspots and have since mapped over 500 million of these since 2010. Although we can automatically detect if a password is required to connect, determining if it's free or not is another challenge as there are plenty of non password protected walled-garden hotspots and plenty of (what we consider) free hotspots where you still need to find out the password (e.g. cafes, restaurants etc).

So our algorithm looks at a number of heuristics of each hotspots including (but not limited to):

- Are there clues in the SSID (e.g. does it mention +ve keywords like 'free', 'cafe' or -ve keywords like 'staff', 'private', 'employees' etc).

- Is it part of a wider network that we know more about (e.g. 'ATT-wifi', 'Starbucks-Wifi' etc)

- Do we know what kind of place it is? (e.g. if it's a cafe, is it more or less likely to be free?)

- Is there a walled-garden behind the hotspot (we attempt some automatic background checking of this similar to the way Android & iOS will do this on new hotspots).

- How many distinct users have we detected connecting to a particular hotspot (If many, is that a sign it's a public place?)

This is just a sample - we look at over 20 different heuristics on each Wifi, none of which are individually conclusive, but together give us a strong indication on whether a Wifi hotspot is free or not.

However, it's unlikely we will ever be able to completely accurately classify free Wifi through a purely hueristic algorithm which is why with this new app we are asking for user input to help us curate this algorithm. Not only can users help tweak any hotspots that we have classified incorrectly, but we can train our algorithms to be smarter by learning from their input. We believe that this dual approach of an automated algorithm combined with manual curation from the crowd is the best way to solve a problem like this in the long run (not least because we didn't want to provide users with a blank canvas and ask them to classify Wifi without us doing any of the hard work first!).

Any feedback much appreciated!

[1] http://opensignal.com

EDIT: Tweaked line formatting

Indeed - this is exactly the challenge we are working on. In future versions I think we will provide more detail on the classifications (e.g. 6 out of 7 users marked this as Free).

In the user interviews we carried out some of the key use cases we've found for Wifi use are:

- People without unlimited data plans who would prefer to preserve data on their mobile plan

- People travelling abroad and want to avoid roaming fees (although I'm partial to a local sim also, for many this is quite technical)

- People who want to find a nice cafe to use their laptop

- Faster internet (Much of the world can't rely on fast LTE networks for example)

- Connectivity in places where there's no mobile signal (e.g. underground restaurants, bars etc).

This would be useful for a not-so-monetizable crowd ... the modern "hobo" population: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/572691/Homeless-hobo-cod... ... and anyone else who cannot afford or choose not to pay for extensive data plans.