Slashdot Mirror
NYT: Making Free Wireless Wi-Fi Internet Pay
securitas writes "The New York Times' Matt Richtel writes about the the challenges of finding a sustainable business model for 802.11 Wi-Fi wireless Internet. The problem for entrepreneurs, telecom companies and others is that the proliferation of free wireless access hotspots at the municipal and grassroots level has obviated commercial carriers' revenue and profit models in many cases. One user quoted in the story sums up the attitude of many wireless users: 'The Internet is free here.... Why would I pay?' IHT, published by the New York Times in Paris, is carrying an abbreviated version of the story."
I had one person tell me I had no right to lock down my WiFi access points at my home and the 3 WiFi at my church because the internet should be free, and I was dening people access to the internet by not alowing them access to a pipe they were not paying for.
The article makes no mention of security which, it seems to me, will be the best way to make money in the hot-spot business. When I use a public, non-WEP hotspot, all I ever do is SSL to my command-line account and run pine or some such. (My internet provider hasn't done secure POP yet, but they're working on it.)
On the other hand, maybe there's no money in security either. When traveling for work, I can use secure VPN into the company system, and it doesn't matter whether my hotspot is secure or a total cesspool. So there's no reason to pay extra for T-Mobile on the company dime, and I'm certainly too cheap to pay extra when on my own dime -- I'll just use SSL to check email.
It is a conundrum. Perhaps WPA is the solution, but I'm not waiting up nights for it to be widely implemented.
I can see the ads already...
"When you share your internet connection with someone, you're sharing it with everyone they've ever shared their connection with."
"Sharing your internet connection facilitates the spread of viruses. Do you want to lose all your files to the untrusted menace?"
"This is your computer. [SMASH] This is your computer sharing its wireless internet connection. Any questions?"
This is a repost of a comment I made that nobody modded :-)
Free hotspots are acceptable in places where it's not much of a marginal cost, and where people wouldn't be able to 'leech' very much (i.e., hotels and such.) But in places where there are a lot of randoms, that is no good.
I've also seen pay-to-access credit card methods, but I wouldn't want to use them -- that is mainly for business users.
An advertising based hotspot as in this article seems very annoying, but it would also be pretty easy to hack Mozilla and get around the advertising overall.
How else can we pay for wireless? Here -- My idea, never heard it elsewhere, I think it's good:
A wireless hotspot 'jukebox' (or parking meter, or vending machine, or whatever metaphor you would like).
It is simply a box with a coin deposit -- anyone can go up and put a coin in, and the machine gives everyone in range Internet access for X amount of time. (1 dollar for 15 minutes? If people actually USED dollar coins, it would be good, I think).
Anyway, I believe the social model of this would be interesting: the person who needs it most and who can probably afford it the easiest (doing business or whatever) will end up paying for everyone as long as they want to use it. If there is no 'business user' at the time, the people who just want to use it casually will probably just volunteer to pay for one unit at a time.
This method is convenient, easy to implement, cheap to build, and easy to use. Admittedly, business users would probably rather have a credit card and authentication system that would allow them to charge it to the company, but I think that casual users would spend quite a bit more than they currently do. It is pretty cheap for them.
Anybody hear of anything like this implemented anywhere else?