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Time Warner Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Hotspots
Hotspots writes with a link to a BusinessWeek article discussing a new service that Time Warner Cable is offering to its customers. Flying in the face of most business decisions about Wi-Fi availability, Time Cable customers will soon be able to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots. This privilege comes as Time Warner inks a deal with the Spanish startup Fon, which is already operating a similar deal with ISPs in Europe. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available. Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running."
They couldn't maintain a cable internet connection at my house much longer than 30 to 45 days before some contractor screwed up the line amplifiers in the neighborhood, or a squirrel gnawed through their cables. Then, after waiting twenty minutes on hold listening to sales pitches for their digital phone and security monitoring, I get told it will be two to three days before someone can come out to look at the problem. Good freakin' luck.
Time Warner subscribes to holistic IT. Why risk invasive repairs when incense and herbs are so much safer?
Roadrunner works GREAT for me. I couldn't be happier.
Obviously, some people have better luck than others. I am a very happy RR customer and look forward to using these hotspots as they come online.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Two reasons. One, you get free access to all other Fon wireless APs around the world. Two, you can instead opt to receive part of the revenue your hotspot generates and forego the free access elsewhere.
That's the theory. In practice, I don't see hotspots in any locations I might want to get access from (because they're nearly all residential and I use wifi hotspots on business) and, for the same reason, I can't see a residential hotspot generating much revenue.
The article isn't too clear on this, but if you go to Fon's site at http://www.fon.com/, you'll see that Fon defines three user types:
Aliens - Non-FON users who pay for access at FON access points belonging to either of the following groups.
Linuses - FON users who do not receive any monetary compensation (other than a majorly discounted router), but get free access to any FON access point owned by a Linus or Bill
Bills - FON users who get 50% of the proceeds from aliens using their access point. They don't get free access to other FON APs owned by Bills or Linuses.
So if you live in the middle of nowhere, it makes lots of sense to become a Linus. Your AP will almost never be used by others (and if it is, you can restrict their bandwidth to a reasonably large degree), but you get free access to any other FON APs when you're on the road.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, you are missing something.
You maintain a hotspot (with two SSIDs, one with a 10 digit WEP key, the other open) and let people access your hotspot over the open SSID. In turn, you either get half the revenue generated on your hotspot, or you get free access to any other hotspot operated by FON. If you live in a high density area (near a Starbucks, big apartment etc) you can subsidize your hotspot, if you don't you get free wifi roaming. If you're not interested in either, don't get the router. It's not like Time Warner is going to force you to sign up.
They charge $2 a day for access and don't have density in the US yet (they're bigger in Europe and Asia) but they seem to be growing. Personally, I've run across one FON hotspot when I actually needed one, and found two more when I didn't really need access or had a wired connection, but there's a Starbucks near my house (in Toronto) where the Chinese restaurant next door runs a FON access point. I've never been (don't like Starbucks coffee) but my friends use the FON signal all the time.
Ultimately, what this means is that Time Warner is allowing (encouraging?) people to maintain open access points, and will update their terms of service to reflect this.
Reliability is inversely proportional to competition. As competition increases, reliability decreases.
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Your astute economic analysis explains why after 70 years that Toyota, the horrendously unreliable competition to ultra-reliable GM, is now the world's top selling car manufacturer
oh wait
http://www.speakeasy.net/ has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.
FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.
We have a large list of all the zones in our district, all with specific building codes and regulations that state what we can and cannot do with the cable. Some places actually ban us completely from burying any new wires or doing anything to repair them (as the construction/tearup of the ground would look unsightly), so the most that we're left to do is to try and neaten up the cable as best possible (though some city zones even forbid this. You don't want to be a customer living in those areas.)
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