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.

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?

are you liable?

[Kizzle]

What happens when someone starts looking up kiddie porn on your connection? Are you liable?

AUP Problems

[Raetsel]

Serious problem... Joltage wants to encourage people by paying them to extend their network. Many of the benefits, none of the work... nice idea.

The problem is that most end-user DSL (and all consumer cablemodem that I've seen!) Acceptable Use Policies explicitly prohibit reselling the service!

I'm signed up with a Washington State DSL ISP that has been incredible --

1. They got me installed when Verizon said I wasn't in a servicable area
2. I have their SO/HO level of service
3. I can run servers
4. I can host my own domain (two, actually!)
5. I can NAT and firewall to my heart's content
6. I don't have to deal with PPPoE (straight bridge config)
7. I get 5 IPs...

   (Can you tell I like this company?)

But even with all this freedom, I am still not allowed to re-sell access. I run an 802.11a access point, and it's NAT'd off on its' own -- anyone can connect... but I am contractually prohibited from profiting from it.

Personally, I don't think Blarg would have kittens over this. They're not "like that." Object, yes... charge me more, yes. Call in the National Guard... no. However, I can see other ISPs (Comcast comes to mind, with their NAT inquisition) that will scream that this is the end of the world.

Security issues destroy ideas like this

[treat]

The security issues of allowing random anonymous people access to an internet connection that is in your name are quite overwhelming. Consider the wide range of things that could be done that would bring the full force of the law down upon you. From fraud to illegal images to death threats against well-known individuals. The police would not accept as a defense that you allow people who you don't know access to your network. You will surely be arrested, which means you will probably lose your job - depending on your employer and of course whether you are released on bail. You might get off on a trial, especially if the search of your home and your computers turns up no evidence against you. If you're lucky, you will get your eqipment back in a timely fashion after your acquital. This is if you get acquited - the details of the case, how much the police/FBI want to get you, and whether they find anything else suspicious on your machines will decide this. You don't have to be charged with anything they find for it to be used as evidence against you - something as simple as an archive of every Phrack - or even a single issue - would weigh heavily against you.

Until this issue is worked out, it does not make sense to make a wireless internet-connected network publicly accessible if you are just an individual.

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.