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.

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.