Wireless Mania

burnsy and others sent in links to stories about 802.11b that are cropping up everywhere. The New York Times has one. (Well, two, actually.) Salon has one. InternetNews has a piece about Boingo, a new wireless start-up, that's also covered in this Forbes article. (The NYT article above also mentions Sputnik.) Both Boingo and Sputnik are trying to leverage the existing community wireless networks to speed their network build-outs. MIT's Tech Review has an interesting piece about a wireless start-up that has already tried and failed. Fixed wireless is also booming, according to an industry study.

Comments

Make Boingo for PalmOS

[5u5h1]

Boingo sounds like a good idea, but what they really ought to do is make it available for PalmOS. There's already an 802.11b SD card available, and this could be the perfect application for it.

Anyone remember this?

[Sapphon]

IIRC, there's a group in Australia who have been forming their own little wireless network with rooftop antennas. The trouble they have been facing is the amount of space between nodes, but they were well on the way to having a network between Melbourne and Adelaide (though several users in Albury/Wodonga were isolated in their own little network)

There goes my brainstorm...

[rbeattie]

I had this great "million-dollar" wireless idea a few months ago that I quickly emailed to all my friends and got all excited about. The idea was to provide software and a service that would let anyone with a wireless access point set up a custom access server where they could easily charge for use of their bandwidth. Not just businesses, but anyone with a good network connection and a WiFi hub. Any wireless users that wanted to use the network could sign up to service where they could buy hours or credits. Then the local server keeps track of the time spent using its bandwidth and the proceeds are split between the server owner and the billing service. The idea is that instead of relying on "free" networks to sprout up, this would give incentive for people to open up their wireless connections by allowing them an easy way to charge for it (making them franchisees in a sense). Also it would give users a bunch more access points for reasonable charges.

However, according to this quote from the TechReview article, I've got the business model upside down:

One of the most surprising things we learned from launching our Internet startup was that providing wireless Internet service is really cheap. What ended up bankrupting the company were all the ancillary services we had to develop--credit card billing, technical support, the corporate Web site and the various security measures we had to put in place to prevent unauthorized use of the network by nonsubscribers. Organizations that aren't trying to make money providing wireless Internet service can do away with all of these measures and offer the service for free.

It seems that providing the infrastructure is the cheap part (the part that I was trying to solve) and doing all those "extras" is where the costs come in. Doh! Was really excited about it for a while though...

-Russ

Is it, or is it not, easy?

[bourne]

"Conventional wisdom" says that hooking up to WiFi networks on the fly is as easy as falling off the turnip cart. But as the Salon article notes, for the average joe that isn't the case.

I'm not down at "average" - I eat TCP/IP for breakfast - but I haven't figured out wireless yet, either. I've got a ZoomAir card but none of the interesting software (NetStumbler mostly, but others too) seems to support it. I'm probably just missing some totally basic groundwork, and making it too complex because I'm used to delving details.

What's the general experience? Is this stuff easy and I'm just on the wrong page? Or are the only people who're surfing like mad the people who understand this shit inside out?

Can anyone recommend wireless primers for regular usage as well as um, more 'dynamic' usage?

MIT Economics?

[skeptic]

I don't understand how the MIT author believes offering bandwidth for free will not drive up marginal use.

Whenever something is free people use it as if it's free, that is to say freely. This is not a good recipe for an economical campus (or office) network.

In economics this is known as the Freeloader problem, and is ubiquitous amongst public goods.

Remember, nothing is ever entirely free, someone always pays. In this case the MIT author's bandwidth was being paid for by students.

It's actually illegal in the UK

[Colin Smith]

You are not allowed to use the unlicesed bands "by way of business". Despite that, Boingo still included UK Consume nodes in it's database, without permission.

Check the Consume mailing list archive for the furore it caused.