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Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors
A few days ago, Dan Rutter (the Dan in "Dan's Data") published an interesting idea for extending the sort of philanthropic technical pranksterism that spawned throwies by applying the same approach to Wi-Fi. That means, looking what he hopes is not too far down the road, creating Wi-Fi repeaters that are cheap enough to deploy on the sly and frugal enough with power to run on solar power or cheaply replaceable batteries. But as he says, "If you've got a lot of spare money, a ladder and no respect for private property, though, you could already be stealthily deploying Open-Mesh or other such gadgets all over your neighbourhood." In some cities at least, you'd be hard pressed to ever avoid at least one available wireless access point, but that's not the experience for most people, most places -- which bears correction.
Service is intended for one household only. And you're going "OMG GREEDY ISPS!!!" because they want to make money? It's their service! The greedy bastard here, is you. Newsflash: It's not your service. Feel free to make a personal wireless network that doesn't connect to the ISP's network, but don't be stealing their service "just because you can". Bad as the media companies for wanting "control over networks"? Here they'd just stop it because it's people are breaking the terms of agreement. It's NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMON CABLE THEFT. Oh, do you support stealing that, too?
My UK ISP already provide for 'municipal' wi-fi via an affiliation with FON. By opening up part of my spectrum, I get to piggyback my mobile devices on some other member's wi-fi when I need to.
The only additional item here seems to be not getting ISP permission to do what they are happy to give permission for anyway. Rebellion this isn't.