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Startup Launches Open Wi-Fi, Challenging ISPs
Chuckles08 writes "Forbes has a story about how FreedomPop is trying to disrupt the public Wi-fi business. From the article: 'Getting hosed by your Internet service provider may seem as inevitable as death and taxes, but a new startup aims to change that. Startup FreedomPop, which is backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, DCM and Mangrove Capital, provides cheaper Internet access and the ability for people to share access with others on its network.'"
I hope it can disrupt the connectivity oligopoly that reigns at the moment. North America's connectivity is, on average, twice as bad as Romania in 30 something position. Lets do this!
Tomorrow is another day...
At some point, someone is going to get into *serious* legal trouble through this. Most likely via someone using their connection transfering child porn and getting caught. It only has to happen once. The story will be widely publicised, including all the horrifying details of the caught-in-the-middle victim having their life torn apart, losing their job, being vilified by their neighbours, and having every computer, phone, games console, hard drive and USB stick they own confiscated as evidence. As a result of this, other users will be terrified to share their connection and risk becoming the next victim of an investigation.
The same reason there are so few tor exit nodes.
This is just as fucking insane as running a Tor exit node. Have fun when les federales show up at your door and lock you in a cage for distributing child porn.
Also, the only reason we ever hear about this is because some douchebag who made Skype approves of it.
I was keen on this until I had a look at the privacy policy. They don't even pay lipservice to privacy, explicitly saying that they will combine whatever information they get from you with information from third parties and also share your information with third parties. I wouldn't use this without a VPN.
We have it here in Israel and it seems to work pretty well. http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000768403&fid=1725
Fon.com does this in Europe for years and years now, and they do it in style.
In the city of Groningen, The Netherlands, population 180,000, the cable company has converted the wireless routers of most of the subscribers into dual private and open Wi-Fi access points. Almost all subscribers agreed to participate. In return the subscribers can use each others access points using their own username and password. As you walk or cycle down the street the connection stays permanent as you move from one access point to the next. Both the cable company and the wireless phone operators are in fierce competition with asymmetrical infrastructure. This move by the cable company seems to be designed to undercut the need for 3G/4G access for tablets and smartphones. There are plans to roll out this new type of usage throughout the country.
I doubt this Freedompop will accomplish much
The general public does not need more than a few megabits/second. Google should blanket Kansas City in wifi, along with its fiber optic network. Specifically, as a Kansas City only VLAN, it should fully use the 5 ghz space of 802.11n, and access to it should be free. Access to the internet should require payment. The general public doesn't know what is possible with wifi networks.
FWIW, all four major carriers offer this in France:
http://www.ariase.com/fr/guides/hotspots-wifi.html (url is in French)
Basically, users from your carrier get to use your Wifi, and in return you get to use their own Wifi routers across the country.
France is not alone, either. For carriers, it's a cheap way to roll-out a nationwide Wifi network, with the added benefit that they can then redirect mobile data traffic to land pipes, resulting in less encumbered wireless networks.
sorry, how is this different from fon?
The thought is great, not sure if it can work though. But what we really need here in the US are more affordable wireless phone providers.
Unfortunately FreedomPop is building their service on top of Clearwire's WiMax service, which doesn't bode well for the performance or the reliability of the resulting service.
Clearwire ceased their buildout more than a year ago, and assuming they survive the next few years will be trying to roll out an LTE network on their spectrum. In the meantime their WiMax network is already oversubscribed both on a per-tower basis and a backhaul basis; as a result the actual speed of the service isn't much better than CDMA 3G, never mind HSPA+ or LTE. Adding a bunch of users is only going to make this worse, especially since FreedomPop isn't the only service taking advantage of Clearwire's cutthroat rates.
Clearwire's 2.6GHz spectrum may also be a minor concern here. Based on the results of Clearwire's own efforts, their spectrum works well for mobile use but has a lot of trouble penetrating homes, which is where a service like FreedomPop is most likely to be used.
Ultimately like any other wireless service this is going to be entirely area-dependent. But for most users they're effectively buying into a cheap 3G-ish service with no quality of service standards. It's cheap, but that's about all FreedomPop has going for it.
Sprint is about to purchase Clearwire, so everything will turn up roses. Just like it did when the bought Nextel.
the caught-in-the-middle victim
Assuming for the moment that the real problem comes from IP's logged by servers and handed over to the cops, so that TLS won't solve this - has anybody worked on a distributed HTTP proxy that will scatter and gather HTTP byte range requests?
The person using the proxy system would get the whole file, but each proxy itself would only ever get a part of the file. I'm also assuming that a judge would throw out a charge for downloading 1/100th of a naughty picture.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I have a FreedomPop hotspot, and it works well enough when I'm in an area that takes it. But I only get 500MB free every month. I have to re-RTFA but I believe you get 2GB on the home network box. Basically a Netflix movie or two and some browsing and you're done.
I got the hotspot basically so the family will have some connectivity to their tablets when we're on the road somewhere. It doesn't work in my house but it works at the office.
... FDN here is an ISP for more than 10 years now, non-profit, and I believe the only one that does not restrict you from re-providing your access, via wifi for instance, to other people "in the street".
All others ISPs in the country have definitive restrictions, which oblige for instance all hotels and campings to apply for specific different contracts (which, guess what, are much more costly)
FDN has the curious intent to demultiplicate themselves into smaller, regional ISPs rather than "getting more customers nationwide". Clearly they believe this to be more robust, but I'm not really convinced. I for one am still a customer of the earliest, Paris-based instance, while living 500 Km southwards ...
ISPs like FDN are IMHO the only way to plug an open wifi network and stash the antenna on your balcony, legally, at the time being here.
Herve S.
Same idea, different company ...
In a nutshell, the ISP where I work doesn't do any active logging beyond the basic router logs. Right now, 90-95% of our customers are NATed, so we don't even lease that many public IPs from the tier 2 provider we use. To my knowledge, the most we do is provide information when it is requested (within reason), or by court order.
There was a customer with some suspicious activity from their modem that connected to (I'm not joking) known international IPs of organizations that are bad news. When we were contacted by the FBI to find out who this person might be, we learned that this activity (millisecond-length bursts of data) is part of a known botnet. Had the company been subpoenaed, we would have had little information to provide, other than the router logs that only track MAC/IP history (I don't think we even use an extensive DNS history).
Is this because the company is fairly small, and the percentage of offending traffic is negligible or not even present? Maybe. I do know that one of the employees has been pretty aggressive with the amount of MAFIAA material he torrents on the network, but I don't know that it's even been something that has caused us to get unsavory attention.
Watch out, they're full of hidden charges on their "free" 500MB/mon 4G service. If you don't use at least 10MB/mon, they charge you a fee. Data is rounded when it's used so it keeps rounding up. If you go over 400MB and don't have at least $10 in your account with them, they charge you so you have money in your account. Basically you have to use at least 10MB but less than 400MB a month to keep things free and with the data rounding that becomes very hard. Additionally, while they say they refund the price of the device deposit when you return it, you are charged an additional $10 restocking fee. Checkout the huge thread on slickdeals with lots of people upset about their service and all the hidden charges. I was about to pull the trigger on one but luckily read the info on all their charges and decided otherwise.