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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
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!!!
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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 did not RTFA, but a related story was on Tech-TV. http://www.techtv.com/news/scitech/story/0,24195,3 587957,00.html
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.
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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*
Does Cringely's approach have holes? Sure. It's an article, not a business plan. Skipping the tech details, Cringely's plan boils down to "build a million hotspots -- wherever people want to put 'em up, 'cause they're free -- and the rest of the world will beat a path to your door". With sufficient marketing and technology partnerships, the approach might even work, assuming that all the details that Mr. Fleishman pointed out got addressed.
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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".
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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.
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.