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."

Comments

Right...

[ObviousGuy]

The plan is missing a key component: incentive for the providers to do such a ridiculous, money-losing thing.

Been there, done that, no thanx.

[WindBourne]

I was part of a company that tried that model 4 years. We were slaughtered. Perhaps now that equipment is cheap, but ....

already there...

[d_i_r_t_y]

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.

Re:already there...

[pigscanfly.ca]

As a matter of fact its a wonderful idea .
Have an open connection that any one can plug into , anything does happen (read RIAA file sharing nazis) "it wasnt me . It was any one of a number of people with in a 450 feet radius of my house . Unless they were using a special antenna then it could be a couple of miles" .
Defense in a bottle :-)
Drink once .
Repeat.

Re:already there...

[Bios_Hakr]

Your equipment will still sit in a locked evidince room in the basement of whatever agency decides to persue it. Your home will be invaded by men in combat gear with machine guns. You will be led away with your hands tie-wrapped behind your back. Your computer, router, cabling, telephones, VCR, TiVo, DVD player, etc will all be taken. Your books, bank records, credit card records, and family photos will be taken. Any writable media including (but not limited to) CD/DVD-r/rws, floppies, and home video tapes will be taken. Most of your licensed software will also be taken.

The stuff will sit in the evidince room for a LONG time. How long? At least until the investigation is closed. They may claim that they will hold it until they have a chance to do a forensic analasys on it, but they can take forever to do that. Your lawyer will tell the judge to give up your stuff. The cops will claim that a murder, rape, or drug case has precidince and they need more time. The judge will side with the cops.

You will probably never see your stuff agian. If you do, most of the writable media (especially your precious home videos) will have been destroyed by the forensic analasys, which, as far as I can tell, consists of holding a powerfull magnet next to everything you own to see if child porn pics will leap off the disks. Any hardware returned to you will be out-dated and may or may not work as cops have a tendency to turn on your PC and hold the CPU fans still to see what happens.

Claiming ignorance or even being stupid has never been a viable defense. When it comes down to it, they can't prove you downloaded the thing. But if you don't cooperate, they can still make your life suck.

Don't just think the prosicutor will say "Oh! You had an open WAP! Our bad; you are free to go." It's not gonna happen. But hey, I'm not bitter or anything.

Keeping track of hotspots

[sempf]

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!!!

Cool idea, but...

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Different model

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Did'nt Joltage and Sputnik try the same thing?

[puneetb]

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...

Sonic.net's Hotspot Bribe

[billstewart]

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.

Here's an alternative:

[Newer Guy]

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*

Re:Glenn Fleishman's reply

[mmurphy000]

My biggest problem with the parent's linked-to blog posting is with this:

Free wireless. It's all over the place. Community groups. Municipalities. Businesses. Groups of businesses. Free wireless is a huge inchoate "movement" in which thousands of locations offer it without any coordination among most of them.

This forces the "coordination" onto the end user. I've tried using free wireless at hotels, airports, etc. Each requires its own SSID and WEP settings, for valid security reasons, but finding those values and teaching it to the network card is more of a challenge than many people can deal with. So, saying that we'll get broad-area coverage by a mix of a dozen or so big aggregators and umpteen zillion little free hotspots isn't all that practical either. Imagine having to reprogram your cell phone every time you go to a different building -- serious bitheads wouldn't mind, and your average consumer would just avoid cell phone technology. Cell phone networks tended toward oligarchy (a few big-time players) to address this issue and provide semi-universal, no-reconfiguration-required coverage.

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.