Slashdot Mirror
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?
Glenn Fleishman already has a response, which can be basically summarized as "You and what investors?"
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.