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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."
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.)
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You may like my a cappella music
Aren't you concerned that the feds are going to show up at your door because someone was downloading child porn on your connection and they think it was you?
Seems you're assuming a lot of liability to me.
You haven't read much Cringley, have you? He's a nit wit.
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?
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 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.
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
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 think the reply was mostly saying, why change all the firmware around when existing stuff will work. we can already do mac address filtering, we can already do a lot of things.
Anyway, my knowledge of wifi isnt huge, but it doesnt seem beyond imagination for the following with existing wi-fi standards:
Register your mac address with the hotspot provider's network, then wander to any hotspot run by the same company. Unregistered macs get onto a network where the only page they can access is a registration/login page. Put in your login and register your mac address either temporarily if youre using a friends laptop or permanently if you plan on using this laptop permanently. Mac address goes into the filtering db, and you have access.
But...YOU are paying for your connection. You are sharing your connection because you can AFFORD to. You are also sharing your connection ONLY because, thus far, no one has taken advantage of it to do something illegal (child porn, cracking, "illegal" music downloading bigtime).
There IS no free internet anywhere. YOU are paying for it, you are merely being generous with your money (giving it to your neighbors, in effect). That's cool as you can obviously afford it. You are hosed when the feds or RIAA comes after you (or your ISP).
It is NOT a business plan to give away free internet if there is no income stream somewhere. The hardware doesn't make itself, it costs money. The actual connection via an ISP is not free EVER. It costs. I cannot see ANY business doing this (just charities like yourself) UNLESS there is an income stream to cover the costs (plus a profit...making it a business rather than a non-profit organization).
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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
hummmm. I have been thinking that he is one of the few thinking tech writers who does not just spew total crap as determined by the marketing dept. Their are a few others, but most are worthless. This guy reminds me of Dovark when he was young and worth reading.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem with this is the same as the problem with gnutella network and the like. The problem (addressed by game theory, by the way) is that you get a huge number of cheats. Those who take, take, take, but give nothing. In gnutella, that is the overwhelmingly huge number of individuals who ONLY download but provide nothing.
Without some form of regulation, there is no way to prevent the cheats from being a large fraction of the users (being crackers, spammers, filesharing/music swapping bandwidth hogs evading RIAA, child-porn downloaders and pedophiles, and plain old "me, me, me" selfish bastards). As long as a small number of people are willing to pay ISP charges so that everyone else can use their non-free connection for free, you can get by on a bandwidth basis. Oh yes, you also need an ISP that has no heartburn with your sharing.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
You are hosed when the feds or RIAA comes after you (or your ISP).
Hmm... Since you are sharing your internet connection, in rather the same way that your own ISP does (sharing their backbone connection), would that not also turn YOU into an ISP and provide you with all of the protections involved in being a service provider (not responsible for what goes through your network, only what's hosted ON it) rather than an end user?
Perhaps if you registered yourself as a home-based business?
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I don't think any part of this plan involves having the WiFi "aggregator" actually aggregate any traffic at layer 3. The whole point is that the people who set up the hotspots are already getting IP connectivity from some ISP, and the people using the hotspot just use that connectivity. There isn't any need to centrally aggregate the actual data traffic.
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.
I can't believe it's still being proposed as a buiness idea. This type of project should, IMHO, be looked at more like a public service project. Something akin to the national highway system. Information Superhighway is a term I heard a while back.
Publicly fund it, and publicly police it.
Or, just make it law that bandwidth can be shared and TOS that limit such a 'right' should be considered null and void.
The Internet economy is strange because it's one of abundance rather than scarcity. And that abundance only shows up after MASSIVE capital investment. Reaching that critical mass for Wi-Fi would be tough for a single company, but not quite as tough as a country.
+&x
There's a HUGE gap in his plan. I suppose some people kind of forget that at one point these networks need to crossover into the traditional network for all those servers still hooked up to a T1 without WiFi and in other countries. Sure, in a dream world everyone would suddenly switch to WiFi, the country would be covered and some really nice company would provide a link to that hude line under the pacific ocean that connects to Europe. NOT IN THIS LIFETIME. You cannot possible convert everyone to WiFi at once and even if enough of these pop up, you'll still need a company or method of connecting to the traditional network through an ISP.
That's not even considering that the fact that companies aren't in this lifetime going to give out free WiFi equipment. His example of AC Chase doesn't apply to WiFi.
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.
Sure, but SSIDs are long enough that you can put a much clearer string in the name, like "FreeWifi" to make it clear to people who happen by, even who don't know about the convention, that you are ready to have them use it.
Even better, however, is to have a URL or e-mail address as your SSID. This allows people who see your SSID to mail you to ask about it. I met a neighbour that way.
Combine the two, and make your SSID freewifi@yourdomain.com, so people can know about it and can also meet you.