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Speakeasy Introduces Broadband WiFi Sharing Plan
An anonymous reader writes "Today, speakeasy (the greatest ISP ever) sent out a letter from the CEO introducing their NetShare Wi-Fi plan. It lets you share your broadband with your neighbors, with Speakeasy handling the billing and splitting the fee 50/50. More ISPs should be like this!"
No, I actually mean it.
This is a great way to get the penetration without the risk of people fucking up the configuration of innumerable devices. No more battling with IOS or iptables. No more wrestling with the choice of sendmail, exim or qmail. Now, someone else does all the grunt work, you just sign up users - And you get money for it.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
I wonder how this appiles in states where using a router is (or will be) llegal. Its amusing to me that ISP's hand out routers themselves, or in this case encourage connection sharing. Kinda spits in the eye of certain lawmakers that think they know something about technology.
I'm all for the WiFi boom, but I wonder what new (read: idiotic) laws are going to start surfacing if people are broadcasting their internet connections around.
In Washington, Free == Illegal
As someone with a firm grounding in economics, I must admit that I just don't get it. ISPs and other groups have high fixed costs, and low variable costs
In English, that means that a lot of the infrastructure costs XXX million dollars, no matter how many customers they have and only a few things actually cost the company more as they add more customers. Because of this, I cannot understand why they would want to let people split service costs.
This article made me think of a joke I once heard... A man goes into a restaurant and sees a sign: "All you can eat 10 dollars, half of all you can eat: 5.50"
Doesn't it seem counter-intuitive for them to offer this service? I mean, increasing the number of people on residential circuits without increasing the number of paying customers is just going to degrade the service for everyone. People are still going to do it behind the backs of ISP's, but they are actually promoting it. Also, what determines which house gets the access point if the price is split 50-50 for everyone? Just a curiousity.
The site is down, or I would look to see if there are extra fees for getting service like this, or what other restrictions are put on. All-in-all, this seems good for the consumer, since you can get cheaper net access if you can get neighbors to chip in, without fearing the wrath of your ISP. Probably the RIAA should take a lesson from these people.
bananas like monkeys.
I hope the other ISP's take notice before Speakeasy overruns them.
On second thought, please come to California and overrun my DSL provider soon.
All they have to supply is the bandwidth (damn cheap, unless your neighbour is a spammer) and some light-duty billing support (also damn cheap) and email services (also cheap). In return, they get a nice new income stream.
Definite +4 insightfull!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
supporting a neighborhood network can have alot of benefits if you plan it out. Consider kazaa on one single shared server that everone can remote desktop into to download, then everyone has instant access to what the others have downloaded. Now when someone finds a cool game everyone else can get interested in and you have an instant wlan party. Suddenly its more convinient to download tv shows then recording them.
The beuty of the internet is you can connect to japan as fast as your neighbor, the problem with the internet is you connect to your neighbor just as fast as japan. Wifi can change alot if you allow it.
Now THATS what I call a supernode!
Am I responsible for the NetShare customer usage?
So what liability will you incur if your neighbor you just signed up :sends fraudulent spam
defaces a website
cracks a site and steals cc info
publishes libel and slander
distributes child porn
distributes the latest eminem track
etc
This might be taking on more than I'd want to deal with!
I got a new neighbor who had the bright idea to ask me about running cat5 to my house, so we could share dsl costs. I told him that, since he only had a laptop, he should get a wireless card instead, and I'd get him online.
Now he pays a share of the bill, in exchange for connecting to my AP. If he knew anything about wireless networks, and/or knew that I was already intentionally running an open AP before he moved in, he might not be so willing to pay for an equal share of the line... But he doesn't! =)
I wonder if running a NetShare AP rules out running a wide-open free AP. Neighbors won't want to pay if they can get it for free, right? I think my setup now, with free access for anyone who knows what free access is, and payment from those who don't, works well for the time being. Nobody better educate my neighbor, though, or I might have to install NoCatAuth or something.
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
haha, maybe if something like this comes out in my neighborhood maybe THEN would my stupid neighbors realize that sharing a connection is NOT NOT illegal...
I'll vouch for that. Conversation between me and lady tech at speakeasy:
tech:"how do you know your connection is down 30% of the time?"
me: "I use Big Brother to monitor it."
tech:"Oh cool, we use that here too. Is there a URL you can give me to look at it?"
me: "Hmm, no, it's on a server inside my network, and I don't have a hole punched in the firewall for it."
tech:"How about emailing me a screen shot?"
me: "Hmm, hang on- I don't remember which program it is that does screen shots in Linux."
tech(sounds of her standing up):"hey guys, anyone remember how to do a screenshot in X?"
I was speechless...
Please help metamoderate.
I've had Speakeasy and while they were good, SureWest Broadband IS the greatest ISP ever!
t a. html
http://www.surewestbroadband.com/wf/products/da
I forgot to mention that the greatest ISP ever was DNAI (Berkeley, CA), who was bought by RCN who promptly sold off their DSL biz to some crap company that drove it into the ground. Well, RCN started to drive it into the ground before they sold it.
The original DNAI was far and above the best ISP I've ever had the pleasure to do business with. The people were first rate.
And get this: you called their # and a human answered before the 3rd ring.... and that human was competent and helpful.
I'm hoping that having an open access point will allow me the same defense. I can't say for sure it was my neighbors but I can say there's a reasonable doubt.
'course, that's only if I was stupid enough to go to trial.
closed minded is as closed minded does
I got this email about 6 hours ago and had a chance to check the site before it was /.ed. Very interesting idea, as it brings the whole idea of a bandwidth reseller down to the user/geek level. Combine this with a OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD/Linux VPN, Squid web proxy, icecast server, a locally-shared fileserver, Quake/Half-Life server and such, and you could sell a value-added DSL/WiFi package to your neighbors. Get enough to sign-up (or add enough extra features to raise the price) and you could quite likely cover the entire DSL line cost via subscription co-payments, getting your own share of the DSL just for providing support to your users.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
if speakeasy is doing the billing: in the mind of the customer speakeasy is the connection. thus, if the local wifi network guru doesn't have the best skills - speakeasy may begin to look like the problem.
(for business broadband on the east coast or dc earthwave.net.)
peace outside
If only there were some execs at the RIAA who thought like Speakeasy, they'd actually be making money rather than spending tons of it on litigation.
They shoue embrace change rather than attempting to suppress it. By doing this they're only prolonging their inevitable, slow, painful demise.
An even happier speakeasy customer.
I have a wide open network here, as do two other people on my street. Personally I have enough trouble making wifi stretch across my house, I do have a rather large place. Anyway I also live in gated community so wardrivers would be booted by security pretty quickly.
By the way I also have a place in Marathon on the Florida keys, I found a company there that uses 2.4ghz to broadcast 2.4ghz thoughout the island. It even works on boats. It is tdma not wifi though. Service is pretty good, 512k up 2mbit down for $30 a month, slight latency. Unfortunately they use NAT so you don't get a routable IP. DigitalSail is the name the company incase anyone wants to know.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot, that he himself could not eat it?
I used to live in an old house in the South, which had a guestroom with its own front door. The idea was, travelers could stop here in the middle of the night, and carry on in the morning. These people were complete strangers, and usually did not arrange ahead of time.
Now I mentioned this was an old house, built before the Civil War. Apparently hospitality to strangers was a lot different back then.
I find it interesting that some people are willing to extend a similar electronic hospitality to the wandering traveler, in indirect gratitude for similar treatment by others.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
i'd just like to add my personal experience with speakeasy as an ISP in 2001, i started paying them $200 a month for 1.5 MB SDSL with 80% of that rate guaranteed. for a year it worked but then dropped below the guaranteed minimum occasioanlly, and then often, and then constantly. despite many calls and emails to their support department my open tickets were always closed with comments like "customer doesn't know what he's talking about." Finally i closed my acct with them and started with cyberonic, who provides 768K upstream for $40/month, and haven't gone under 90% of that yet in the past 6 months.
Actually my keys place is work related. And no I don't feel like a greedy opulent sack of shit. I make a good income doing something that helps people. It has nothing to do with IT. I co-founded a company, worked a hundred hours a week for a long time and went deeply into debt to get where I am, and I would have done it for free. Finally gated communities are not unusual in Florida.
-Now I mentioned this was an old house, built before the Civil War. Apparently hospitality to strangers was a lot different back then.
Esion, do you know WHY it was perfectly safe, common and acceptable to have a guestroom complete with accomodations and leave the front door open for anybody passing by to use before the Civil War, and not after?
Same reason it used to be perfectly safe, common, and acceptable to leave an unsecured Wireless AP on your network but now it isn't.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I was once a Speakeasy customer, and I think highly of them. But the greatest ISP is my current one, New York's bway.net. They explicitly let you share your Wi-Fi connection, although they don't seem to let you charge for it.
Here's the relevant section of their TOS: