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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?
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.
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?
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).
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
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.