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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." '"
From the article, FON is charging the extra users. It's extra revenue for them. The extra users aren't getting on for free.
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.
damned bleeding heart pirate and crime promoters, these telcos, how dare they muddy the waters of evidence-gathering against all those copyright-thieving artist-income-depriving file-sharing child-porn distributing criminals?
Some providers in the US also try/tried that, starting as early as 2003, and usually hoping that non-customers would pay $$ to access their network through such user-provided "open" wi-fi APs. I don't think this worked overly well so far though...
http://www.sonic.net/hotspots/
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/
Other "Foneros" can access the public channel for free, while non-Foneros can pay a few dollars a day to use the access points.
"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."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
RTFM. Slashdot doesn't delete posts because Taco doesn't believe in deleting posts. There are two ways I know of for a post to disappear:
"We" can't "block" "this guy" from "concievably" posting, for several reasons:
My advice to you is that you delve deep into your user configuration page and fix it so that you don't see AC posts or -1 Troll posts at all. Alternatively, type up a bogus DMCA takedown notice claiming the shit-eating first post as your own work. Before you can even click "Send", Taco will be knocking at your door wearing nothing but a pair of see-through panties and handcuffs, eager for you to administer his "punishment" for being a "bad boy".
That's the point, BT has BT openzone, so at places like airports BT gives wi-fi access, if you partipate in this scheme, you let people use your broadband, and in return you can use theirs and BT's. It's like communism, but the good kind :P. Of course you can choose not to, and you pay a little to accesss the wi-fi area.
Must be screaming in pain now.. Even less of a way to determine who downloaded/uploaded something that is *isp sponsored*.
Cool.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.