Slashdot Mirror

Similar to your option 2, Sputnik is trying to make WiFi hot spot deployment and management cheap enough for people to put them up for free end-user access. Someone (probably the provider) can reap the benefits from advertising on a splash page or login page that the end-user sees when they first open their browser.

See for example what 3rd wave is doing in Atlanta:
http://www.sputnik.com/partners/customers.html
http://www.3rdwavehotspot.com/
3rd wave purchases the APs and manages the network, and end-users in Atlanta just request where they want them and use them for free!

Caveat: I work for Sputnik, so of course I think this stuff is cool...

For the record, I work at Sputnik.</disclaimer>

Sputnik offers almost-free ($10 administrative fee) management software for community access points. There's more on the requirements at our site. With luck, you'll be able to install our management agent on some off-the-shelf APs next month (we're testing some now), but you can also get the hardware through us.

Nobody has found a right business model for Wi-Fi today.

Somebody imagined Sputnik some years ago, where volunteers/partners would run a self-contained router on their 802.11b-equipped computer, allowing access to roaming paying Sputnik customers, and receiving a share of the price of the connection time.

It was a brilliant idea : anybody and their dogs could run the Sputnik CD and make some money when Sputnik customers connected, and the Sputnik company could cover the country with wifi in no time thanks to people effectively "lending" their hardware to them. Only trouble was, for people who wanted to become Sputnik access points, it was akin to reselling some of their internet bandwidth to third parties, which is forbidden by most ISPs. I guess that's why today's Sputnik, Inc. seems to have abandoned the idea and reverted to being another boring AP manufacturer.

Too bad people don't have the right to do whatever they choose with the bandwidth they pay for, or that Sputnik didn't try to sweet-talk major ISPs into allowing this in return for a cut of the pie, we'd have fantastic wifi coverage with this today otherwise.

Sputnik?

I thought there was already a kit available.

Of course, there's Sputnik

You would have to make people download some stuff that would run as root before they could get on your net. Or you would have to disallow forwarding on your gateway and make some sort of page forwarder on your web server, that would only be accessible through a page with the banner ad in, say, one frame at the top, and the forwarded page below. But then you couldn't use the network for anything but surfing and certain kinds of surfing wouldn't work i bet. Well, actually, you could disallow forwarding on just port 80, then people could do other things besides surf. Hmm, maybe you could do this. I'm scaring myself, maybe I should go help the fascists in Beijing lock down the PRC internet. blech. Maybe joining a network like Sputnik might enable a more sane solution.

We need an Open Source PVR system that does a better job then Video 4 Linux at helping users install and operate PVR functionality. It would be neat to see something like the sputnik distribution accept for PVR. We can call it GiVo. (GNU TiVo.. ) Make it so any Pentium or better PC with a CD Drive, TV Card, and Lots-o-disk can boot up a very small kernel and turn it's self into a PVR box.

I'm not sure of what exactly are the differences between the two. Sputnik seems to have more information on their pages about the architecture, but they could be very similar, from what I'm reading.

If they are similar, this is one industry that's already in need of a shakeout. I imagine the real value of something like this being in availability and different systems don't help that much.

Thanks! We're looking for folks to help us in this effort as well - and we have a serious offer to any developer who helps out:

If you contribute code (a patch, a new feature, etc.) that goes into the standard release of the Sputnik Gateway, you get free roaming for life. (Whichever is shorter, yours or ours)

Join up on the developer list, which is what we've got until the full-blown developer site is finished.

I wish they supported more than just the lame Intersil Prism II cards. I have two lucent/orinico, and a cisco aironet :( I was all set to download, but then I read the requirements. Here's hoping that more coverage will come. Its all there in the kernel and/or pcmcia-cs.

They aren't aiming at consumers, but at businesses.

I don't see that on their site - where are you seeing it?

The definition on their Sputnikology page seems to imply both consumers and businesses:

Sputnik Affiliate

A person or company that sets up a Sputnik Gateway and shares unused bandwidth with others. Sputnik Affiliates get priority roaming access across all Sputnik Gateways.

I don't know if the ISPs will be pissed off or not....If anything, it should make the consumer broadband ISPs happy, since it restricts unauthorized use.

That depends on who is running the gateway. If the ISP is running the gateway, great, happy ISP. If Joe Blow with a cable modem sets this up and allows anyone in the Sputnik network to use his connectivity, the ISP will be less happy.

Look at the Sputnik Sign Up page. Doesn't look like they're only planning on working with the ISPs...

(Arguably, this use would conflict with the "not-for-profit" clause of most high-speed internet access agreements. So the ISPs probably do have a leg to stand on. God knows they can't build a decent mail server, but they do know how to litigate...)