Selling Your Wireless Traffic to Passers-By

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.

Comments

Wireless Network Can Be 100% Safe

[PhysicsGenius]

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?