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Selling Your Wireless Traffic to Passers-By

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the just-don't-forget-to-ssh dept.

An anonymous reader submitted a bit about a company called Joltage who wants to make it so that home and business users can make a few bucks by selling their excess bandwidth to people who just happen to be in the neighborhood. Besides the obvious security issues, and the serious lack of coverage once you get out of metropolitan areas, this could be seriously cool.

4 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Excess Bandwidth?... by Jaysyn · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...there is no such thing is there?

    Jaysyn

    --
    There is a war going on for your mind.
  2. Wireless Network Can Be 100% Safe by PhysicsGenius · · Score: 5, Funny
    The IT professionals among us are rightly concerned about software security implementations, especially from a well-known company in Washington State. The even more knowledgeable are concerned about the protocols themselves. This concern is 10 times greater when the network data is whizzing through the air for anyone to intercept. Luckily I've had an idea that may prove fruitful as a first line of defense against tactics such as "war driving".

    Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can propagate.

    The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue.

    I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?

  3. Re:This is ridiculous by NewIntellectual · · Score: 3, Funny

    You hit the nail on the head. What people have today on their cable modems or DSL lines is really PEAK bandwidth capability. Does it really take a genius to see that if every cable or DSL line tried to run at maximum speed that no provider in the world could handle it? It's a matter of statistics. As you noted, all that would happen would be lousy service for everyone (this in fact already happens in areas where cable modem nodes are overly subscribed.)
    A useful analogy would be to imagine a bunch of firehoses hooked up to a water pump that can move 100 amount of gallons per minute. Let's say each hose can move 10 gallons of water per minute. People have valves that let them turn it on and off at will. Let's say there are 500 hoses hooked up. This may still provide acceptable water flow on as "as needed basis" if usage is bursty, but turn them all on and you aren't going to get 5000 gallons per minute aggregate water flow: You're going to get what the pump can move, 100 gallons/minute, aggregately. Or in other words, given equal resistance among the hoses, 1/5 gallon of water per minute flowing from each.

  4. Re:My neighborhood by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Correction: his girlfriend will be blackballed by the single Cable provider. When that happens, he just has to find another girlfriend with a cable internet connection