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Making Wireless Carriers Play Together
An anonymous reader writes "Ok, so the idea of opening all Wi-Fi networks in a misthought utopian vision didn't go over so well. But no one discussed the best part of open Wi-Fi networks: bonding different Wi-Fi and mobile carriers to get the best price and decent performance. We could save money and avoid lock in by bouncing to whoever gives us the best rate, and, when we need speed, jump on all of them at once for a network bonded boost."
You don't get to make another Slashdot submission to say "and another thing!" just because nobody liked your first one.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
the hotspots have too many limitations
which is why everyone is buying a smartphone. the service is not that expensive if you're on a multi line account
Police Raid Wrong House, Steal 18-Year-Old Girl's Computer Thanks to Unsecured WiFi Connection
http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/29/police-raid-wrong-house-through-technolo
Just because you can connect to multiple spigots doesn't meant that they don't eventually lead to the same water main. As for saving the customer money Android already provides for the ability to switch over to configured WiFi hotspots when detected.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Someone over at /. HQ has spent some time on a vision quest in Sonora. You should have left the Peace Pipe in Arizona.
sudo make me a sandwich
Please take your false sense of entitlement and go bond with your own network. You're unwelcome on any non sociopath's net.
Uhhmmm, I'm pretty sure the sociopaths don't want this guy freeloading off them either...
You all know the words - it's sing along time!
Why can't we be friends,
Why can't we be friends...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Why isn't there one giant coast to coast network with many providers, the same way there is one internet with many ISP? Other than the obvious reasons of benefitting consumers.
I am in a neighborhood with choices in broadband, and have considered buying redundancy. Current promo options make it very feasible.
Comcast here has reliability issues due both to overhead wires that go out for days(annually), and an irritating tendency to show lag (or momentary outages) in the 10-90 second range(daily or worse). I assume the latter is due to doing service on the live system, but is impossible for me to diagnose as it is gone before I can characterize the problem to even complain.
I wouldn't mind adding a cheap DSL if I can bond the two in a way to improve my service, but I am not clear how to do that. True bonded service might work, but I don't know how to set that up on two IP addresses. My current router won't do it, and I haven't looked into equipment choices.
Any suggestions?
Right now there is enough speed on the mobile networks, at least in the city, to do what you want to do. Virgin 4G is pretty fast, when it is working. Even ATT LTE is pretty fast, but the limits makes it useless for anything real.
As far as WiFi, again we have to look at where the money is. The cities could do what is suggested, but they have been thwarted.
Eventually, hopefully, we will not have our mobile technology that was designed primarily to allow telephones to jump from access point to access point. WIFi may not be the best technology given range and power. And some sort of shaping technology will have be made to insure that people like the poster don't saturate the bandwidth when they want to get the latest blue movie.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Um, yeah. Only three little problems to overcome.
Physics: more people using WiFi does not increase speeds. Quite the opposite.
Technology: No matter how many 'connections' you have, they are all using the same shared oversold resource. Using more of that resource on one connection means there is less bandwidth available for the other connections.
Legal: This is no doubt very much against your TOS
One MAJOR issue with this... My TOS (Terms of Service) with AT&T specifically disallows me sharing my network connection with more than 4 devices.
My provider at home has TOS rules that keep me from letting people not living at or visiting my home from using the bandwith.
You can bet the providers would find a way to stop this, either by TOS restrictions, by technical means or both.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
My Android phone already switches to configured WiFI when available, or am I supposed to buy accounts w/ all the carriers in my area?
I don't see how bonding 2 connections to the same access point helps me any.
I know I can bond multiple connections from my network, but is bonding connections from different carriers even possible?
So you want to get a bunch of mobile hotspots in a room and then dynamically choose one based on some rules? You could used pfSense off the shelf for time-of-day and bonding purposes but I don't think it will handle packet accounting. For automatic routing look into the meshing algorithms (e.g. BATMAN) but that doesn't do everything you want either.
Could we convince you to save a ton of money and have a cable modem put in instead?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What would be really cool in a not too distant future...
Interoperable networks to the point that you can go buy a phone anywhere and use it on any network. No more CDMA vs GSM vs iDEN.
Postpaid pay-as-you-go plans with every carrier
Software on the phone that functions similar to a least cost routing algorithm...I.E. I want to send a text message right now, go check with every carrier and get their current SMS rate, then when you have it, select the carrier with the lowest rate and use them to send the message. Same thing for phone calls or data. Say you pop open the facebook app, your phone would go get the per KB data rate from every carrier and send the request through the cheapest one.
Naturally the actual LCR algorithm itself would need to consume data to do its job, so perhaps this could be something built into the GSM spec where all of the towers exchange this info as part of the network overhead.
But just think about what this could do...no more carrier lock in, no more price gouging, actual COMPETITION in the market.
The telcos would HATE it and FIGHT it and try to make it ILLEGAL to do things this way.
But take a second and actually think about it - how much would this do to promote innovation and prevent price fixing?
You could actually probably do something similar to this today with the various prepaid carriers assuming you had two or more than were on the same network type...