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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."
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.
Glenn Fleishman already has a response, which can be basically summarized as "You and what investors?"
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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
Error: Id10t detected
Wear a watch that beeps when there is an internet connection nearby, and stop and check out email?
Well for wardriving you could use
1.Use a zaurus(or any other PDA with wi-fi)
or
2.use This device
or
3. us this directory to find free hot-spots
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.