Corporate Encouragement For Sharing Your WiFi

anagama writes "Conventional wisdom is that one should lockdown wifi, your ISP doesn't want you to share your connection, that person checking email outside the coffee shop ought to be arrested. The UK ISP BT is offering an alternative model. The company will encourage its three million broadband users to pick up a FON router and start sharing signals. 'For BT, the move makes its broadband offering more useful to customers, who can access the Internet from more places, and BT doesn't need to build out a new wireless network itself. BT's Gavin Patterson, a managing director, holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain." "We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny." '"

Comments

Sure, I'll share my broadband...

[daedalusblond]

...but will BT pay for it?

The only way i see this working would be if organizations were compensated for sharing. Not just "encouraged". It'd be nice to put some of the excess on our fiber circuits to good use.

That's how San Fran et all should have done it

[turnipsatemybaby]

I can think of no simpler way to implement a city-wide free wifi system than a grassroots method such as this. Not only is the up front cost relatively inexpensive per user, it's distributed across thousands of people who can take part if/when they see fit, and it's much easier for individual people to maintain than a central authority.

Not only that, you would have the redundancy of having multiple choices of APs in a given area, so if one goes down for whatever reason, you can still choose another.

It's almost like the equivalent of swarm intelligence, but applied to wifi.

Re:That's how San Fran et all should have done it

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't "grassroots", it's being done by BT. BT is essentially pre-compromised by british intelligence services. Now, they tend to be somewhat less unpleasant people than american spooks (subjective), but still, this is basically pre-emptively building a monitorable and centrally controlled wireless network before british subjects start getting too uppity and build their own widespread mesh networks, much harder for big brother to control and monitor.

Re:That's how San Fran et all should have done it

[Angostura]

Every mesh network I've seen employs at least one backhaul to enable Internet connectivity. Now, unless you believe that there will be a wealth of intra-mesh communication that the spooks will want to see, the backhaul is where they will tap.

Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner..

[joe 155]

firstly, what the hell are you talking about? plausible deniability of what?

But what really annoys me about your comment is the shear stupidity of it. Is the UK a nazi-esque state? no. If it were would the media be able to report about when the police did make a bad call and kill an innocent man? would the independent police complaints commission investigate? would it be possible to criticise the government at all?...

So tell me how many death camps does the UK have? I can count... none.

Calling the UK a Nazi state is an insult to all the people who died because of the Nazi regime.

So lets see....

[SirLurksAlot]

You share your bandwidth with someone else and the ISP pockets a little extra money if that someone doesn't happen to be a current customer? Yes, according to the article the other users will be on a different channel, so your service isn't interrupted, but no matter how you look at it you're still splitting your pipe. Also, since this scheme involves a new customer paying for access on your (already paid for) connection why not apply the extra money as a credit on your bill? I'm paying a pretty good chunk on my broadband (Time Warner), but I wouldn't mind this setup if it meant my bill was going to be lower.

Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner..

[meringuoid]

Tell me, if the man you referred to running towards an underground train with a backpack on shortly after severeal suicide bombings had been a suicide bomber too, would you like to explain to the hundreds of casualties, deaths and relatives why the armed police there to protect them didn't shoot? The percentages say, it was better for that man to die than to risk the hundreds, and as a result we also live a more concious society of these incidents which in itself helps protect us.

You are fucking joking, right?

Percentages, is it? OK. How many people wear backpacks in London? Millions. How many people run for a train? Millions. Of those, how many are suicide bombers? Four so far. So, shoot anyone wearing a backpack who is running for a train, on the off-chance they might be a bomber?

Moreover, despite the initial lies put about by the police, de Menezes was not carrying a bag of any kind. Nor was he wearing a heavy coat.

Just two questions...

[hack slash]

If you do sign up to the scheme then:

1) with the ever growing list of people getting done for illegal activity, ie downloading mp3s/illegal porn/'hacking' etc., will you be exempt from any charges relating to criminal activity through someone using your router?

2) is the broadband service provided truly unlimited?

I can't see many people in their right minds signing up to such a service if they weren't protected from neighbours doing heavy downloading and the drive-by wifi'ers downloading stuff deemed illegal. Because on one end of the scale I wouldn't want additional charges for bandwidth use or have the speed restricted due to too someone else using it too much, and the other end I wouldn't want to be arrested because someone else used my internet connection through the wifi router for criminal activities.

Re:WTF?

[binarybum]

yes. ISPs would be much more secure if they didn't make internet access available to customers. And banks would be much more secure if they weren't always dealing with people's money.

    Sharing anything causes an increased security risk. The more hops data makes, the more vulnerable it is. The most vulnerable place typically being where it first enters a network.
      The question then becomes can BT manage these new security risks well enough to keep customer satisfaction at profitable levels? I'm sure they have some pretty smart people behind figuring that out, and I hope that they are right.