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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
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.
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!!!
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
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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Glenn Fleishman already has a response, which can be basically summarized as "You and what investors?"
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
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?
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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?
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.
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
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 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 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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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*
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
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.
Saaaaaaaaaay... no there's an idea. It'll probably make more money than the wifi idea. Just wait till the vulture capitalists hear of this.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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 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.
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.
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.