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$5 Social Wi-Fi Router
slashjunkie writes "BBC News is running a story about the Spanish firm Fon, selling subsidized Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi routers for $5, in exchange for the buyer agreeing to a 12 month contract of providing access to other Fon users within range. With the financial backing of Google and Skype, their goal is to create Wi-Fi networks, street by street, across Europe and the US. Buyers of the subsidized routers can classify themselves as 'Linuses', whereby they also get free access to all other Fon hotspots, or 'Bills', where they receive 50% of the revenue made by on-selling their Wi-Fi to other Fon users. 'Alien' users can buy 24-hour passes for 3 Euro. To deter misuse, all Fon users must identify themselves by a username and password before they can access the hotspot. As long as the owner's personal LAN is not accessible, this could be a good way to offset the costs of the average geek's bandwidth bill."
I don't know about the rest of you but with Cox we can't share our Internet connection with other people in that manner. You would probably have to get some kind of agreement with your ISP before they would let you share your Internet connection for a profit.
This is a great idea, and one I think will gain a lot of strength as information providers find ways to subsidize lower-cost connections to their services (especially Google). I already co-op with a half dozen of my neighbors to share our Internet bandwidth through WiFi. I don't charge for access, the router is open to all, but it does have a landing page that requests that they pay for what they use. So far our bill is paid about 8 months into the future.
In our neighborhood we already have 4 high speed internet providers, so competition is fierce but pricing is still fairly high due to local government idiocy (they want all the providers to pay a fee to be allowed to serve the area). We even have 2 medium-speed wireless providers who serve our area too, but they're also a bit expensive due to the village fees (how would the village stop them, though?)
This is the right step in the direction of providing inexpensive or free bandwidth to everyone. We don't need cities or governments paying for it, we just need the end profit-makers to subsidize the initial cost. Our connection should happily support 50 households (or more) for basic Internet usage, and if they want to use higher speed services, they're more than free to select from one of the providers available. For more, paying $5 a month for a decent 6 Mbps connection is well worth it, even if we frown on Bittorrent or other massive leach programs.
I've already talked to 3 other people in my neighborhood who are interested in doing the same thing. The plus side is that we communicate better (through a private forum) with each other than I've ever seen in a neighborhood I've lived in. We talk about security issues, odd cars on the streets, and all sorts of issue that people used to think we needed government for.
I really support these systems and would love to know if there is a way to privately sponsor some of these routers so that they're free, or even sponsor the bandwidth charges of people who offer this service to others through their own connection. Anyone know?
When this is inevitably used by someone to do something illegal over someone else's connection and it gets traced back, I wonder how they'll work out who is responsible. It could be sort of hard to identify and sue/arrest the real culprit when the general public has tacit permission to wardrive at you.
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Not to mention that WiFi isn't exactly the greatest medium for voice. I mean, you can only scale it back to 6Mbps. This is like using a sledgehammer to do dental work.
I often wonder if the industry is specifically thwarting efforts to develop a wireless voice transmission medium for the public masses to protect cellular interests. I'd really love to see a low latency, high distance, high concentration 128kbps wireless link. This would allow employers, residences and municpalities to replace cell phones, for the large part.
Can you imagine 20 users at a coffee shop trying to use WiFi voice at the same time?
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I think most people on here are missing the whole point of these things. Sure you get a $5 router (plus shipping) but that's not the real great part of this company's idea. If you want a cheap access point go to Wal-Mart, if you want free wi-fi wherever you go just go to... uhh wait that doesn't exist yet! At least in my area if you want any wi-fi you have to go to some coffee shop or park in a motel parking lot. The great idea behind this is that you will be able to have free access to all the wireless hotspots you could imagine if people will do this. My router has already been ordered and I've passed their website along to all my friends and relatives hoping that we can help in this great idea.
As to those of you who are worried about reselling our ISP's internet, it's FON's access point so it's not actually your problem. Besides as long as you don't have AT&T what are ya worried about?
I think something like this would be particularly useful for people who get the Opera browser for their DS. Wireless internet access in your pocket!
Doesn't this violate most ISP's terms of service? I am sure that mine bars me from sharing freely with others, let alone for financial gain. For this to be perfectly legal, wouldn't you have to buy some sort of commercial-grade access? Are things different over in Europe?
Which is to say, sharing the bandwidth you get through them = smaller bill.
You're missing the Big Picture: once there is a nationwide mesh network of these things, Google will light up their dark fiber backbone and link all of these babies up. Then, with their bandwith needs met, they'll drop their backbone connections and watch as AT&T et. al. flounder helplessly trying to flog their now-hopelessly-overprovisioned goods. Their share prices tank, executives commit suicide, then Google and Amazon swoop in and pick up the remains at fire-sale prices. They then shift back to the more-reliable landlines, but the routers remain, silently blinking, waiting for the next command from the Googleplex...
MAN, this is good coffee!
Just junk food for thought...
Chording keyboards? They've been around long enough for people to have heard about them, but they so far have failed to catch on. I think most people just wouldn't be able to grok using it.
Trackball sized pad on your hip? Would get uncomfortable after a while.
Head mounted displays have serious problems from headaches to inability to quickly change focus to the real world.
Speach recognition? Still not that great in studio quality silence, will be a disaster to use in loud areas, or places with multiple people speaking (Office, subway/bus, war zones...) Not to say that these technologies and similar won't have incremental improvements that will make them less annoying to use, I doubt they'll able to be able to pass the "can you use them while driving a car" test. I guess what I'm thinking of is more along the lines of direct neural link. From preliminary experiments, it seems that the input part is practically trivial: the brain reorganizes itself around the electrodes to best communicate. There have also been extremely primitive visial input systems devised: basically the CCD of a video camera is connected to a subject's tongue. when activated, the subject can't yet make a visual picture from the stimulus provided, but they can react to the information presented within a short time (E.G. blindfolded subjects being able to tell which direction a brightly colored object is coming towards them from.) While using the tongue may seem odd for visual input, it is the most logical short term attachment site for neuron stimulus: highly innervated, fairly non-invasive, and the moisture allows for better electrical contact. The tongue would probably not be a good long-term site for neural communication, but just shows that the nervous system can adapt to information being presented in a different way than normal and allows us to refine theories and technology for actually using direct neural interfaces.
I suppose with a direct neural interface (I don't really think it's that far away) and omnipresent internet access, we'd be halfway to transuman. Just need to cross that pesky "living forever" barrier, develop near-instantaneous travel and solve the little problem of energy usage, and we'd be fully into the post-human state. But hey... instantaneous communication (essentially technologically mediated ESP to someone who doesn't understand the tech) is a good first step to godhood.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You just described Wearable Computing. If you're interested in it, you should subscribe to the Wear-Hard mailing list and become familiar with some of the research groups working on such things.
You can have a wearable computer right now -- the technology exists, and some people use it daily. In fact, a "wearable computer" can include anything from a cellphone or Nintendo DS all the way up to a $5000 OQO + head-mounted display + chorded keyboard. The area that really still needs development is applications, though -- Thad Starner, one of few full-time "cyborgs" (he's been wearaing a computer daily for years) basically uses EMACS for everything [warning: PDF], for example. In addition, a lot of what wearables are used for now is traditional and obvious stuff like taking notes and looking stuff up. There are many more possibilities for context-aware applications that don't exist yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've been noticing ESSID's like "GuestWiFi" around lately but I'm reluctant to use them. It seems to me like anyone asking me to connect is a high risk for man-in-the-middle attacks. There are so many potential ways to abuse this. Most DHCP users also receive DNS server settings. The person who controls what you use for DNS can do lots of interesting things, like sending www.hotmail.com or www.paypal.com to their server with a fake login page that snags your account info.