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Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan
DarkHelmet writes "This week, Cringely examines the current state of WiFi aggregators, and challenges their business model. His notion? An aggregator should distribute free equipment to internet users willing to share their connection. Although he proposes altered WiFi hardware specifically for his plan, his idea shows promise for a company with enough capital to provide all that free equipment."
The plan is missing a key component: incentive for the providers to do such a ridiculous, money-losing thing.
I have been pwned because my
Why do Slashdotters insist on bastardizing this guy's name in submission after submission? It's "Cringely." One tipoff is the enormous red letters at the top of the article that read "I, Cringely." Perhaps if they were more enormous, or more red.
I was part of a company that tried that model 4 years. We were slaughtered. Perhaps now that equipment is cheap, but ....
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
i am already sharing my 1.5Mbps WiFi link to my apartment block for all to use... i have a 16Gb/month cap, and i never get anywhere near that, so as long as people using my connection don't whore like crazy, i don't mind. live and let live i say.
How are we going to keep track, though? Wear a watch that beeps when there is an internet connection nearby, and stop and check out email? Is there going to be a list? Hell, I can't even find an accurate list of the coffehouses in Columbus that have WiFi!!!
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
This is just asking for the next major worm. If Joe Public can't configure his win box through a nice comfy GUI or update it now and again, he's going to have a hell of a time securing shared WiFi hardware. Sure, it would be nice to be able to say browse the web while waiting for a train or check your e-mail on the bus going into work. What however isn't so nice is the prospect of having your entire local area being compromised and being used as zombies in DDOS attacks and God knows what else. Maybe we should wait until they can protect their own boxes before trusting them as a gateway for someone elses?
I'm constantly amazed about the fluff he writes.
If he knows, then fine, he should go ahead and do it, for christ's sake.
There's a saying in music: Failed musicians become concert organiziers. Failed concert organizers become music critics. (Sorry if "evevent organizer" is the wrong word. English isn't my first language.)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
Glenn Fleishman already has a response, which can be basically summarized as "You and what investors?"
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The same way a cell phone does I suppose. Keep the card scanning for a signal and give us a little indicator in the corner of the screen telling us the strength/availability of a signal.
It seems to me that many of the people that would be willing to pay for such a service would then just become hotspots. Wouldn't that cause a very large drop in the demand, and thus the profit?
The problem is he doesn't really explain how the company providing all this free equipment is supposed to make enough money for it to be worth their while. The very vague notion that revenue comes from the subscribers who don't share their APs seems to have no mathematical backing at all.
Now if we threw away the idea of this being a business at all, and just made it a big nation-wide cooperative... THEN it could be interesting. Everyone would have to buy their equipment of course, but that's not a big obstacle - that would be the personal cost of joining this cooperative.
#DeleteChrome
If it's such a great idea, and likely to make vast amounts of money, why isn't Mr Cringely doing it himself?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It shouldn't do. Personally if I wouldn't wish to rely on somebody else possibly less competent than my less than competent self to keep a WiFi service up and running. After all, if you want something doing right, do it yourself. Besides, those willing to pay for it wouldn't be able to serve whole cities, would they? It would be quite possible that this could generate an increase in demand from those who want the free equipment and cant get a signal where they live - there is afterall only a certain range over which this tech works, right?
You really wanna do something? Get some (a few hundred) geeks in the same city organised. Hope they're nicely geographically distibuted and all get some wifi equipment (not so expensive these days)...and set it up! Free city-wide coverage :)
;)
Then get some kind of voice over ip (not the stuff the telco's are trying, I'm talking more like roger wilco; no connections to the traditional networks neccessary) working on palmpilots and ppc....et viola, you won't have to pay for inner-city calls (which makes a big difference for anyone who doesn't live in the US with it's free local calls)
All you'd need the telco's for then is inter-city comms and landline internet access.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
The equipment runs about $200 to set up a fancy 802.11 hotspot, probably down to $100 or less shortly. Imagine that one of the 802.11 access point/gateway manufacturers set up the sort of thing needed for this to work -- bandwidth prioritizing for the owner, and filtering of spam/attacks for others.
Now, say your running Jose's cafe. You have two choices:
* Set up a hotspot that only users of MegaCorp Hotspot Aggragators can use, for free
* Set up a hotspot for everyone in your cafe for $200, and advertise "free wireless Internet" and increase traffic.
Which are you gonna do? Without some profit motive, you'll probably go for the second choice. Especially since in the case of most networks, you want random friends/business clients/etc. who come over to be able to use it, and you want your Dell with built-in wireless not to need a special card.
I think free wireless would be ubiquitous, if the equipment was set up for more reasonable connection sharing than WAP/no-sharing or no-WAP/security hole.
1. Give expensive wi-fi hardware away
2. ???
3. Profit!
This could really work. It's basically a trade between those people willing (and able) to have broadband internet (and pay for it), and those that won't, but need some wireless access. You'd have access points everywhere. It would effectively give everyone 802.11 access about everywhere (populated, that is). After that, they'd probably put 802.11 in all cellphones, and VOIP would come after that.
You don't really think that cell phone you have cost $100 to make do you? I know the one I got for free cost around $500 to make. How do they make a profit? You don't think that it costs that much for airtime do you?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Robert X. mentions that his plan would see resistance from ISPs who would cite anti-sharing clauses in their end user contracts, and his explanation of how he'd get arround that is that if everybody's doing it, they can't stop it.
Well, that was Napster's plan. And, it turns out that's only half right. They couldn't stop P2P, but they could stop Napster and at least put that company out of business. Kazaa is still kicking around, but their business model is purely as a distribution network for spyware, adware and other troublemakers which does scare away a good chunk of the user base.
In short, this is a pipe dream that will never come true. Universial WiFi is a nice concept, but impossible to execute because the wired network providers behind the hotspots are going to want their cut of the action.
when are broadband providers going to put in the contracts, "you cannot share your connection with a wireless network", ya, I know, hardly enforceable, but if its illegal, no business model with function under that.
Refer to this article in askslashdot that shows providers care how much bandwidth you use
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I'm a bit confused...is he saying that people should just share the broadband connections that we have now? Ignoring all the large things like ISP trouble, upload/download caps, contract violations, etc-Wouldn't the vast majority of these be in residential neighborhoods? How is this going to benefit people? I can see a couple scenarios (getting lost, so using it to find directions and get "unlost"), but not enough. The only places I would want to use WiFi would be someplace like a fast-food restaurant, or maybe along an interstate (when I'm not the one driving, of course),in a hotel, or in an airport/train station/subway station. But under his plan, most of these places wouldn't have it. A lot of hotels are already offering this service (a lot for free), fast-food restaurants wouldn't want to spend all that money for extra bandwidth (the McDonald's by my house uses a 56k conn, I know that much, and before anyone jumps on me, being a business, they would have to negotiate a contract allowing sharing of the conn, and that would cost more than your standard hook-up). The "best" way to spread wifi in the places people will use it, as I see it, would be a federally-supported monopoly...and even then, we'd be losing money until people wanted to use wifi. I'm content using the internet at home and hotels at the moment.
If you build it, they probably still won't come
Is this really new? Did'nt Joltage (even Nicholas Negroponte was on its board) try the same thing and finally go under? After such a high profile failure and many not so high profile ones, not to mention the liability issues of sharing internet access [what if someone downloads child porn using your network, or breaks into some computers or shares music. Since you are NATing, RIAA sees your IP and comes after you!] , your service agreement with your ISP etc I dont think this model will work.
Granted Joltage gave only the SW, but the HW components are cheap enough that giving them free is also not going to help.
The 'hotspot business model' is just running around like a headless chicken...
I can''t imagine there is a big demand for a hotspot outside of my house. How would that justify the expense to the company? I want hotspots in places like public parks, and stores where my wife loves to go and make me wait for hours on end (Marshalls is evil).
I did not RTFA, but a related story was on Tech-TV. http://www.techtv.com/news/scitech/story/0,24195,3 587957,00.html
Would you not pay 5 dollars a month, or something along those lines for true mobility? Imagine being somewhere in your town or city and you have to access the internet for business, social, educational purposes. Rather then using your GSRM on your phone (which is extremly slow), you could use your laptop to access a hide speed connection. I for one would pay for such a connection, even if it wasn't free.
Sonic.net provides DSL and dial ISP services. They have a hotspot bribe service, which lets their DSL customers set up a hotspot and receive 50% of the daily charges for anyone sharing their DSL. So Sonic.net customers can roam, or share DSL with their neighbors, and non-customers can pay a $3.50 per day hotspot usage fee. They don't provide hardware, but just about anybody who runs DSL is geeky enough to buy WiFi, and it's under $100 for access points anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What is the best PCMCIA WiFi for linux? What card would you suggest?
I am looking at the Senao 200mw unit with 2 external antenna connecters, does anyone have any experience with it?
Here's an alternative: A nonprofit loosely organized nationwide free WIFI network. It would be simple to do too. Everyone that wants to join would simply put stars ** on each side of their SSID name. This would indicate that it's owner is part of the network and others have his permission to borrow his connection. For example: My SSID says: "No Trespassing" (it's a joke). If I wanted to participate in the the open WIFI initiative, I'd simply leave my network open and change my SSID to: "*No Trespassing*".
Router manufacturers could even code this into their firmware with a bullseye that could be selected to enable this option. If Linksys did this for example, their unabled SSID would still be Linksys. Enable the bullseye and then your SSID would change to *Linksys*.
Seems simple enough to me.....*anyway*
Check out this little gem: "The average number of simultaneous users for a public hotspot is hardly ever more than 10 so Boingo probably has the capacity for at most 50,000 simultaneous users". Each hotspot is it's own hardware, with it's own Internet connection. There is no "system capacity", and if there were, it wouldn't be calculated in such a fashion.
The man needs help, or he needs to be ignored. This is the third article about him to be submitted in the last two months.
But all of them require somebody to go do the programming work. The centralized approaches have an obvious person to do that, but they require business models. If the cable modem companies weren't suicidally clueless about the data world, they'd offer a $10/month roaming service from any cable modem user that has wireless running. But there are friendlier DSL providers, like Sonic and Speakeasy and to some extent Earthlink, where the users could do decentralized friendly wireless sharing if they wanted because their contracts' terms of service are open.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For an alternative viewpoint, check out Wi-Fi Networking News
It won't work because the WiFi part aside, there's the layer-3 stuff - i.e., the IP addressing, the routing plan, policy-based routing, ACLs, etc. which is necessary in order to get IP connectivity.
WiFi hotspots have to hook into wired backbones at some point . . . this means that your hypothetical aggregator must somehow backhaul the traffic into his network, and that's the rub. The quality of service will be totally dependent upon whatever the local connectivity circumstances are for the franchisee/WiFi people (overloaded cablemodem system, spotty DSL, whatever) . . . since it won't be practical for your aggregator to roll out, say, his own DSL connectivity nationwide, he'll have to backhaul all the traffic across a VPN tunnel (so now he has to manage millions of VPN connections coming back into a central location across aforesaid spotty connectivity, with all the MTU headaches, etc. associated with that; you can't NAT and NAT and NAT and NAT and expect things to work), and on and on.
Enterprises and SPs don't have a good grip on managing networks with mere thousands of infrastructure devices . . . scaling this to millions (or even those thousands, given the above constraints) just isn't possible with today's or tomorrow's (same issues w/IPv6) networking technologies.
The TCP/IP part of it makes the whole thing completely invalid. Sorry.
Saaaaaaaaaay... no there's an idea. It'll probably make more money than the wifi idea. Just wait till the vulture capitalists hear of this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Even if one it NATing , and the only ip that shows is one of the routers wan ip,RIAA or any one else can't just blame the gate way ( in this case the hotspot router's owner). If they do , then a log would be kept to find out which NATed ip requested that illigal traffic.
Having said that, this is a brilliant idea to resolve the last mile dsl issue.
One can't re-sell this service, but I am sure that one can share the wifi without fear of illigal activities.
It much like internet cafe !
it may not help out in the burbclaves, but here in NYC, there's a grassroots organization http://nycwireless. org that has done exactly what you're wondering about, and the effect is brilliant--wouldn't you like to go sit in the park and tap the net at will? you can do just this at many locations throughout the city...
Here's details: http://www.sonic.net/hotspots/hosting/
Here's text from that page:
Summary
Host a WiFi Hotspot using your existing Sonic.net DSL connection and WiFi hardware, and get money from Sonic.net every time someone uses it.
Details
WiFi wireless Internet access is growing at an amazing pace. Last year, for the first time, laptop sales out-paced sales of desktop PCs, and many new laptops include integrated WiFi. Hand-held and even desktop systems can use WiFi for Internet access.
WiFi access equipment is selling at an amazing pace, as home users leverage WiFi to unwire their households, making high speed Internet access available throughout the home.
Meanwhile, thousands of people are using DSL from Sonic.net - and, in many cases, also deploying WiFi on their DSL connections. Hundreds more are coming online with Sonic.net every month.
Notably though, the average DSL connection is utilized to just 1% of it's total bandwidth capacity!
Sonic.net has now made it possible to combine these two rapidly growing Internet access areas, allowing DSL customers to share a small amount of their total bandwidth by using WiFi, and letting all Sonic.net utilize each other's WiFi Hotspots in a secure and managed fashion.
Sonic.net DSL customers can share their connection over WiFi, and will be compensated with a pro-rated daily share of 50% of the Sonic.net basic Internet service fee for any others who use it. The end user pool is huge, as Sonic.net has over 30,000 end users currently, and any of them could utilize your link if they happened to be nearby.
End-users who utilize your link will be required to use a VPN (virtual private networking) tunnel and authentication, so they won't be on your IP address space. They'll each get a dynamic IP of their own for their session. This protects you from any potential liability should they do something improper on the Internet. Also, the pool of users are known Sonic.net members, so they're not likely to be doing bad things.
The VPN tunnel also assures the WiFi end-user that they've got a secure connection, all the way to the core of Sonic.net's network. They don't have to trust the host not to sniff their traffic, it's all secure as part of the model. The host also benefits from VPN, as their own use of their WiFi is also encrypted - no more hassles with exchange of inherently insecure WEP keys, MAC addresses, etc.
There's a bit of a financial incentive for sharing this abundant and unused Internet access.
For each day that a neighbor or passing Sonic.net customer uses your link, you'll get 50% of their pro-rated daily basic Sonic.net fees - so, that would be about $0.31 per day, or $9.47 per month. If a non Sonic.net customer wants to make day use, they can pay $3.50 with a credit card, of which you'll receive 50%, or $1.75. All of these credits will be posted to your account, and will offset your own DSL costs, leaving you with a lower monthly bill. If you had some dedication and enough WiFi users, you could even turn your DSL line into a profit center!
If a Sonic.net customer makes use of more than one Hotspot in a day, the hosts of each of the Hotspots split that customer's share of fees. If Sonic.net enters into roaming agreements with other Internet or wireless providers in the future, you may receive additional settlement funds of different amounts.
Sonic.net pays for all credit card transaction processing costs, costs for support and marketing, etc.
Basically, we're taking open community WiFi sharing of DSL and making it totally integrated by offering "Sales, Security, Settlement and Support".
There's also another benefit
-- Dane Jasper Sonic.net, Inc.
I always share my wireless bandwith. I reserve 90% for myself. But all of this frees up to other users when I'm not using it. I encourage everyone to do this. Internet access is way overpriced. The ISPs our gouging us.
I wonder if a court could close down such wireless networks as happened with Napster?
I bridge to neighbors, and that works fine. In the end, the wifi is just slightly more expensive than running UTP to the neighbors, but it's more convenient. But connectivity to users isn't the problem. The problem is routing that traffic to the internet.
Ignore for a moment this very dumb idea of routing shared connections through someone's personal ISP account. This means home users are going to have to start setting up T1's and better. That one-time expense for a Wifi AP is dwarfed by the $500 monthly expense of a T1. How about an OC-3 at what, about $10,000 a month? Gonna share free access on a gigabit connection? I doubt it. Cringely's whole premise is based on stealing the most expensive part of the system instead of paying for it, and that hardly makes for a wise "business model".
I can see a couple of alternatives down the road on this:
1. People set up their own independent wifi/wired networks, and ISPs eventually offer to connect to these networks at a reduced rate, or perhaps even pay for the priviledge of a connection. Rather unlikely.
2. Prices for commercial-grade internet connections come down to the point where small groups of people can set up their own systems, and maybe they'll offer free or reduced wifi access. Possible?
3. Broadband becomes becomes so cheap that few would bother stealing it, possibly through deregulation. Everyone has a wifi AP integrated in their broadband access hardware and runs a hotspot. I doubt it.
4. Some new technology makes 802.11x obsolete, and provides better and cheaper wireless voice/data. This problem disappears. This seems likely to me.
After a bit of thought, I've decided that if I wrote pieces for my 12th grade english class like Robert X. Cringely writes his columns, I'd receive terrible grades.
Why? His writing never supports its claims with actual evidence beyone the anecdotal. You can't base a business plan off of an afternoon daydream, just the same way you can't "bounce" a Wi-Fi signal over a mountain with a +15dBm power level (see links).
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020207. html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1124
The point is, Cringely may have some interesting ideas, but he fails to back them up or do any sort of research to try to ascertain their feasibility in the real world, other than spouting off a few random statistics. You'd think Robert might wish to find others that support his opinions. Surely if his ideas are so wonderful, others in the know would validate them. Perhaps talking to an executive from a "failed" Wi-Fi company might have been appropriate for this article.
Cringely may think he knows everything, see his about page on his website. "On Why You Should Pay Attention to Him: When it comes to information technology, I know what I am talking about. Twenty years in and around the PC business have earned me wisdom, if not wealth." As most of us know, a thousand years in the tech industry won't earn you wisdom, and some of the wisest people are those who realize that they don't know everything.
My question is, "Why does Cringely get paid to write his columns?" Week after week of faulty analysis doesn't seem like it makes Cringely a very good columnist. PBS needs to wise up.
It's funny when it's a joke, but that's exactly the methodology Crignelenlengelley proposes - in this and many of his past columns. It's merely an accurate summary, rather than a South Park Underpants Gnome joke.
I have a bubble of 802.11b and 802.11g wifi around my house that extends about 1/4 of a mile in radius, from my local equipment in the server room. I'm not sure if anyone else near me can see/use/associate with my equipment, but it is there. Lucky for me, my current provider has no provisions against sharing my connection with others, as long as I'm not reselling the bandwidth to them.
Then providers would quickly make it against the TOS. In fact, comcast already makes it against their TOS for you to share your connection with anyone else (redistribution of services, etc, etc).
I don't particularly care to hunt around for a 'hotspot', so I'm not terribly interested in the Cringely suggestion. I want internet access -- and it doesn't have to be super-fast -- anywhere in the US (I'd even settle for anywhere in my home state), and I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount for it. I want to be able to easily and quickly connect to the internet while I'm sitting at a client's dining-room table. I was just about to sign on for a Ricochet when that product suddenly disappeared from the market.
e rid=22367
I've seen one service that comes pretty close, and once I get some more info, I may buy it. Cingular is now offering a unlimited wireless internet service for $75/month which includes a laptop PCMCIA card, and will connect to the internet anywhere on their cellular network. That's pretty close to what I'm looking for, although I couldn't find any mention of the connect speed in their ad (or a number of other important details).
One can only hope it's a bunch faster than their current connection using the cellphone, which runs about 10Kbaud. I currently use that because I need something to get email with on the road, and I can't afford to limit myself to "hotspots".
--
Are you an H1-B needing health insurance?
See https://www.worldtrips.com/quotes/default.asp?ref
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
Its not such a good idea. It gives an incentive for people to put up Free WiFi hotspots, cause they get services in return for free. And then alot of people will pay because there will be lots of hot spots. Its not a hard concept to grasp. The question is if a company out there can make money on it, if they can...then its set.
snowulf.com
How does somebody become a tech pundit? When I use the term, I'm thinking mostly of people like John Dvorak and Robert X. Cringely. I'm sure there are others but those two are certainly the worst offenders. They come out every week and state things that are either completely false or uninformed, make predictions which anyone can figure out will never happen, and advise people to do things which come out of business plans that would've been laughable even in 1999. For this they are considered "visionary." I don't understand why they are taken seriously and why they just won't go away.
What happens when customer X, who runs hotspot Y, goes on vacation for a month. Lightning fries the AP. Who fixes the equipment? No way am I giving you the keys to my apartment for free Internet access.
I already have IOpener.
... my divx movies go in and ...
Now I am gona get a free AP ! I love it !
And I love the idea that clients get what is not
used by the owner
out 24/7 100% of the pipe
These guys offer an ISP their servers free of charge and 24x7 tech support. The ISP now has more satisfied customers (traffic gets faster to the customer) and less traffic to the Internet core.
Akami gets to expand its network. The main difficulty is probably maintenance and support.
-Nimrod.
Its amazing how some companies still dont learn from the dot-com era. Business schools should be required by law to teach people that companies need to MAKE money.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Your average person doesn't surf the web in someone else's front yard. People use their laptops at work, at home, at other's businesses if in sales or marketing, at the airport, on the train, in the park etc. Aside from the park possibly, very few of these places are where a private citizen will have a tranceiver that can pick up your laptop. At best this system will allow some people to leech free web service from their neighbors, without giving anything back. I won't get into the issue of who's going to pay for the free WhyFi equipment, since I don't see any revenue source in the pan, just a plea to share your network.
Vote for Pedro
But you've got to admit there's a lot of humor in an outfit that sucks up millions of taxpayer dollars telling real businesses how they should make money.
We negotiated with all sorts of buildings.
We used used equipment for routers(486/586) with a stripped redhat
We use only orinco wifi that worked with everything.
We paid ourselves low wages
And we had nothing to do with dotcom model or a dotcom business.
What would be lacking would be a good salesman or perhaps just hitting at the wrongtime. Fucking grow up?????? Little bit of aingst combined with an immature attitude and absolutly no background?
i live in san francisco. i've been sharing my wifi connection for 2 years. there's a big coffeehouse and two cafes across the street from me. i named my wifi network with a URL so people could read about who i am if they were so inclined. people using my connection have been so sweet. i get kind emails all of the time. i've gotten pints of ben and jerry's, been invited to local parties and have gotten some killer CDs. one of my closest friends now is someone i met via my wi-fi sharing. yes there are dangers. but it's worth it. ;)
but for most places in america (meaning the suburban, sprawly-type places) even "your neighborhood cafe" is probably well out of range. but for people in densely packed places like SF -- just go ahead and do it!
Sprint and Verizon offer the same thing, but I think you'll find their service is significantly faster as they both run on 1xRTT. IIRC Verizon's hits around 2Mbps in Washington DC and San Diego.
T-Mobile, on the other hand, offers speeds around 70kpbs but it only costs around $30/month. I believe it uses the same GSM network technology as Cingular.
www.clarke.ca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I mean, all you need is a wardriving program and you can find free WiFi access wherever you go. That's the whole problem with trying to commercialize WiFi...there are too many "competitors," both business and non.
I do think that the modified WiFi systems he proposes, with bandwidth throttling, might be a good idea just in general, but I don't think you need to give them away for free.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
"The real revenue, which isn't shared with anyone, comes from subscribers who DON'T sponsor hotspots."
As many have pointed out, you don't want to give free hotspots and access to people who set up a hotspot where nobody else will use it.
Nor do you really need to give free access to every person in the network, though you might give reduced priced access.
There is a simple solution though, which is not revenue sharing directly. Reward based on the amount of _paid_ access to their hotspot.
If you get decent amounts of paid access to your hotspot, you get free access everywhere else. If you get limited paid access you get discounted or limited hours elsewhere.
If you get no paid access, well, you may well have to send the equipment back, or pay for it.
This makes a lot more sense, and it is still a good deal for the operator. Get free hardware, and if you are in a decent area, get free access wherever you go.
There is one way to cheat it -- clone the MACs of users with free access and have them show up as "paying" users on your network. It might require either tolerating this, or not counting free access as outsider paid access since it isn't paid.
You used to be able to download a Boingo server and become a node. In exchange you were able to roam across their WiFi network. I assume they dropped it because it didn't work financially.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
...like the rest of us, he lacks the large amount of capital that would be required to do it. The residuals from Triumph of the Nerds cannot be all that much.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I had previously been thinking of something similar for poor country sides to have Internet access. I seem to recall a project a while back about making a simple, cheap PC to distribute throughout rural India. It sounds like Internet connections are less common there and expensive to install. But if you also distribute WAPs along with these simple PCs, perhaps you can setup effective connections based on both relaying to more urban areas and P2P technology, i.e. if the machine could relay to a connection, it would, but otherwise it could try to retrieve pertinent information from nearby PCs. This way you could still encourage the spread of data without too many internet connections.
The idea of shared wifi is to get wireless acess that leads to a wired connection that eventually leads to the internet(a series of wired networks sharing services). Why not move some of the shared services of the internet, and tune them for direct wifi use? Instead of needing a wifi connected to so WAN link to get access to slashdot.org, why not have palms, laptops, etc. use a combo webserver/cache + wifi? where they cache their visited sites, along with being able to host their own, and if you are in range, your network grows to encompass their websites...
So if you have a 512MB CF card, you could carry half a gig worth of websites, so that next time you pass by a palm pilot user, they could view all 1/2 gig of websites you have, as if they were via a normal connection to the internet...
This direct wifi p2p network would also work well with a customized IRC... anyone within signal distance would automaticly join the #wifi channel of the default server. it would ofcourse be a p2p irc server(where certain messages would have to be relayed, possibly), but it would allow for an entire internet cafe to join a virtual chatroom, just by being within range of eachother.
Services such as Freenet that create a more secured internet capable of websites and similar traffic, are getting close. And i2p (invisible internet project v2) might even hit it on the head, but all we need is some program, or api, or protocol (i am not sure how exactly it would be best to communicate directly to another wifi device) that lets us provide internet services (irc, im, www, etc.) by connecting directly with a wifi device in place of the traditional server.
I'm not sure when Sonic.net started doing DSL, but they've been in the ISP business since ~1994-1995, while Speakeasy started as an Internet cafe in 1995, and didn't start DSL until 1998. Speakeasy _was_ my other main choice for DSL, but Sonic's plans looked a bit closer to what I wanted, and they've done some cool rooftop network stuff up in Sonoma that I'd like to see expand.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I hope
Your system is very cozy for das members of sonic.net, but it is really more self-interested capitalism posing as community service than anything else.
You could summarize it by saying:
Basically, we're taking open community WiFi sharing of DSL and making it totally integrated by offering "Sales, Security, Settlement and Support".
/. article relating to "Things that cannot be said"), in Sonoma County saying that sonic.net isn't god's gift to internet users is something that cannot be said,
/. people will be interested, since clearly using their connection in whatever legal way they see fit is exactly what people want.
Should read:
We have invoked the sacred name of Open Community Wireless, then using some sleight of hand, transmogrified it into a 1984-ish version of itself where it actually means Closed, metered, Privately Owned, promoted-by-our-captive-audience-of-suckers wireless.
I know that no one in Sonoma County will stand up to you guys (see the
but it doesn't make you right.
Please update your website propaganda to more accurately portray that service as the closed, fee-based system that it is.
Or if you have the guts, create an actually open, community oriented service where people can share their connections for free if they want to...
You have enough money, and you have enough capacity and traffic from free users can be relegated to the unused-by-the-owner portion of the connection. So please stop frothing on about that so 2 years ago crap.
Create AUPs that allow technically minded people to have "servers", state the damn throughput cutoffs, state a price per GiB over the cap.
Then post your damn ad and maybe
If sonic.net can't do that, maybe speakeasy or someone else will.
ISPs should be on their knees thanking the Feds, big media and the RIAA that they want to suppress P2P and the even playing field (see this), so that ISP's aren't revealed as having no clothes...
What if there was the equivalent of a bank run on throughput, every ISP would be revealed as the shysters that they all are overselling capacity like crazy because no one is allowed to use throughput.
Full disclosure: I am being bilked by "Yahoo" DSL - the DSL that