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

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:How hte hell

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

1. If it gets flushed because the discussion is too large, a la 20721.
2. If our Benevolent Masters at the Church of Scientology disapprove in any way

"We" can't "block" "this guy" from "concievably" posting, for several reasons:

1. We are not Slashdot admins
2. It's not one guy
3. Concievably isn't a word
4. IP bans are ineffective due to the availability of proxies
5. Jews orchestrated and carried out the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in New York

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".