Less safe is less true than it was back when that answer was written: a LOT of traffic has gone TLS-only and the operating systems most people use are secure by default. Yes, there’s always a chance of an exploit but these days I’d be more worried about what links people are clicking on rather than where they’re sitting.
Congestion is also an interesting challenge: in some cases that’s a problem (imagine having an AP next to a school) but since the hardware limits have gone to substantially we’re probably at a threshold point where geographic separation is enough to avoid that problem for a large fraction of places. The public library has open WiFi but there are only so many people who are going to camp out there.
> in some cases that’s a problem (imagine having an AP next to a school)
Really it's the opposite. You put an AP next to a school and it gets the whole school's traffic off the cell tower and onto a local high bandwidth coax/fiber network. You save a ton of wireless spectrum by having low power wifi APs everywhere instead of needing high power cell towers. (And obviously in that case the school itself would be the best candidate to be operating the open APs instead of or in addition to whoever lives next door.)
You don't really get a tragedy of the commons either, because the range is so short. You could go to any given place and find open wireless, but the best way to get a good signal in your own home is to have your own AP. The exception would be high density housing where you're actually close enough to share, but then you do just that -- have all the neighbors chip in to get a really fast connection and share it. You can keep it open to the public as long as the other neighbors pay their share, which is cheaper for each of them than paying for a whole connection themselves as would happen if they defect and cause you to stop offering it. Or, more realistically, in those situations HOAs or landlords could install the AP and pass on the cost as fees/rent.
> Really it's the opposite. You put an AP next to a school and it gets the whole school's traffic off the cell tower and onto a local high bandwidth coax/fiber network. You save a ton of wireless spectrum by having low power wifi APs everywhere instead of needing high power cell towers.
Note that I was talking about a single AP - not a planned large rollout - and just the point that there are a few high-density applications where you actually have to worry about the number of simultaneous users.
Hotspot range is small, and competing networks slow things down. You do not get a tragedy of the commons by making the networks open.
And "open" and "unencrypted" being the same thing is a historical artifact. You can have each user encrypted with a separate key, and WPA3 in fact does this.
WPA3 adoption is still limited, and transition mode will be a necessity on any public access network for many years. “Historical artefact”, eh, like COBOL.
Many things that are in current use and without replacements are historical artifacts, too.
The prompt was not about using the exact software we already have, it was about a world where things were mildly different. In that world, with open hotspots given priority, I would expect the security problem to have been solved long ago.
It takes a fantasy wonderland for increased usage to means a basic feature might get coded sooner? Or to have a few more good crypto people working on the standard?
This is a feature that already exists and will be in most devices relatively soon. Using it in a hypothetical is not magic. Especially because we could sidestep your whining just by setting the hypothetical in the year 2023, because the exact timing wasn't the point of it!
