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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.
Most broadband providers (cable, dsl...) have license agreements forbidding the reselling of bandwidth to people other than in the household for which the line was subscribed. Therefore, this would be illegal.
New term coinage: War Spamming!
Just what I want - to host a random spammer on my home LAN, and be the tracepoint of whatever this person wants to send out on the net. Seriously, if this "guest" wants to send stuff to deaththreats@whitehouse.gov, I'd be the target of an anal investigation by the NSA and the USSS at the very least.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I'm disgusted by this overwhelming sense of entitlement displayed by many in the Slashdot readership in the comments sections. Some of you believe that just because you pay a (very reasonable, flat-rate) fee for network access, email and news, you have a license to use all your bandwidth, all the time in any manner that you please. It's just plain bad manners, and I'm sure that it wouldn't have been tolerated in the internet days of yore when bandwidth and system resources were hard to come by.
Hint: the reason that @Home and its descendents won't let you use IPSec or run servers on their network is that it's their network! Either pay more for better service (like a T1) or rip off some other provider's bandwidth.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
GIVING STUFF AWAY FOR FREE IS NOT A VALID BUSINESS MODEL
I completely agree. Which is why Microsoft is making a serious mistake by giving away Internet Explorer. I mean, really! They re JUST GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE! Sure, they might underprice their competitors, but really, where is that going to get you? They will have to charge more for their other products and services by subsidising that development.
(Sorta similar about what they say about Red Hat).
Actually, the main problem here would be if you resell or give away excess bandwidth, what ends up happening is that the ISP has to rent more bandwidth, thus driving up your costs. Don't forget that bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the only reason why you don't have to pay for it is because you are not using it all constantly, so the same bandwith gets sold over and over.
The problem is not one of business model but of economics of scarce resources.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You allow their customers to access you net connection. They watch the traffic from your node. And pay you a percentage of the revenue (50%).
The long and the short of their business model is: 1) Customers want the net. 2)Customers use your connection for access. 3) Joltage lists your node to get customers to use it. 4) Joltage pays you a percentage for this use. 5) Joltage takes the other percentage.
This is a valid business practice. Where or not there is a large enough market for it is another question. None of this has anything to do with "giving stuff away for free." Nor does it mention anywhere "free bandwidth"
Open 802.11 + open relay = spam spam spam, with *NO* return address.
Yay!
Sputnik is actually an open-source architecture and Joltage is closed source. As for the need for both of these services, there isn't any. They both violate Acceptable Use Policies for most, if not all ISPs. Using one of these services to freely distribute bandwidth to your surrounding neighbors would certainly be more preferrible, than selling it. Since there are even more legal issues concerning selling bandwidth, especially for a home user.
Here's an article at about the two services.
The idea of grassroots bandwidth by-the-people
and for-the-people is certainly democratic and
appealing in a 60s kind of way. But, commenters
are correct in that there are contractual issues
with underprovisioned and over-lawyerd ISPs,
and this vision of wireless utopia is a pipedream.
That said, I and other professionals who travel
would pay for predictable and reliable service
in airports and hotels. I sincerely hope that
Sputnik or Instant802 or Joltage or someone else
who have done the system integration plus the
authentication and proper billing systems win
a contract with one of the major ISPs, probably
a cellular provider, to build out and operate
this kind of service.
Paying for access to phantom bandwidth will not
attract a self-sustaining customer base. Free
access to phantom bandwidth is not a self-sustaining business model. Fix the biz
and and things could get started. It's not the
same as universal bandwidth everywhere, even
though that is a very worthwhile goal. But that
goal cannot be reached in one step. A self-sustaining business is the necessary first
step.
I keep my WAP open and very public. Number one because it's cool, and number two because it keeps me on my toes security wise.
At best I get 2-3 people connecting in a given day. Even if the location was heavily advertised, I doubt I'd see more then 10.
The money I'd make through this would'nt be worth the time and energy to collect income, the system resources on my machine to keep proper accounting, or the loss of helping to build free wireless networks.
I keep my WAP open so folks at the the bar down the street can get online. I wish everyone had that attidude.
The Internet is generally stupid