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

License Agreement Problems

[isa-kuruption]

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.

Great...

[Mister Transistor]

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.

This is ridiculous

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

OK, let's pretend for a moment that reselling your bandwidth isn't in violation of your broadband provider's AUP. Even then, you have to consider that these providers rely on very thin margins to stay in business. They can stay ahead of the game by counting on the fact that not everyone will be utilizing all of their bandwidth at the same time. If you have people reselling all their idle bandwidth to other people, the link at the ISP will be overwhelmed and it will result in bad service for all parties involved. Next step? The only broadband ISP in your town goes out of business. Wow, isn't biting the hand that feeds you great?

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.

Re:Slashdot naievete strikes again

[einhverfr]

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.

More trouble then it's worth

[interstellar_donkey]

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.