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Wireless Networking The Internet Hardware

Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan 195

Posted by CowboyNeal from the nationwide-wifi-carriers dept.
DarkHelmet writes "This week, Cringely examines the current state of WiFi aggregators, and challenges their business model. His notion? An aggregator should distribute free equipment to internet users willing to share their connection. Although he proposes altered WiFi hardware specifically for his plan, his idea shows promise for a company with enough capital to provide all that free equipment."
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Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan More

Cringely Proposes New WiFi Plan

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  • Right... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:53PM (#7938206) Homepage Journal
    The plan is missing a key component: incentive for the providers to do such a ridiculous, money-losing thing.

    • Re:Right... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You haven't read much Cringley, have you? He's a nit wit.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:05PM (#7938293)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • "Yeah, but they'll be providing in a world where Mac OS X runs on Intel PCs and Microsoft will have rebuilt Windows to run over the Linux kernel, because Windows XP is based upon DOS. "

        Shouldn't Cringely have his own avatar by now? Maybe a picture of his ass with an idea lightbulb right above it?

    • Re:Right... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Speare ( 84249 )

      The plan is missing a key component: incentive for the providers to do such a ridiculous, money-losing thing.

      I can't believe this story has been here for nealy an hour, and this sentiment hasn't been expressed thusly:

      1. Install tons of free WiFi hotspot hardware
      2. ...
      3. Profit!!!

      Slashdotters, you've let me down.

      • Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Wah ( 30840 )
        I can't believe it's still being proposed as a buiness idea. This type of project should, IMHO, be looked at more like a public service project. Something akin to the national highway system. Information Superhighway is a term I heard a while back.

        Publicly fund it, and publicly police it.

        Or, just make it law that bandwidth can be shared and TOS that limit such a 'right' should be considered null and void.

        The Internet economy is strange because it's one of abundance rather than scarcity. And that abun

        • Re:Right... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sketerpot ( 454020 )
          This can be both a business idea and a public service project. I know a guy who basically has a monopoly on broadband in the area, and he's handing out wireless hardware at greatly reduced price, partly with his money and partly with public funds. He manages to make a living without charging exorbitantly to cover the cost. Business and public service, together.
    • "The plan is missing a key component: incentive for the providers to do such a ridiculous, money-losing thing."

      I still don't quite get what he's after here (sorry, I'm only on coffee #1). He mentions 0 maintenance on the network, but they give the cards away... CUSTOM cards.. argh.

      I'm sorry for being dumb here, but what problem is he trying to solve? Is he trying to get free hotspots to attract more users? Is he trying to get free hotspots to make money? Is he trying to change the revenue model? In

    • RTFA (Score:2)

      by taniwha ( 70410 )
      "The real revenue, which isn't shared with anyone, comes from subscribers who DON'T sponsor hotspots."

  • Cringely (Score:5, Informative)

    by TPIRman ( 142895 ) * on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:54PM (#7938211)
    Why do Slashdotters insist on bastardizing this guy's name in submission after submission? It's "Cringely." One tipoff is the enormous red letters at the top of the article that read "I, Cringely." Perhaps if they were more enormous, or more red.
    • Why do Slashdotters insist on bastardizing this guy's name in submission after submission?

      It's because I love pissing people off with poor grammar and capitalization. I was just *waiting* for a post like this to show up after submitting the story.

      Being deliberate is fun :)

  • Been there, done that, no thanx. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:54PM (#7938212) Journal
    I was part of a company that tried that model 4 years. We were slaughtered. Perhaps now that equipment is cheap, but ....
    • I don't particularly care to hunt around for a 'hotspot', so I'm not terribly interested in the Cringely suggestion. I want internet access -- and it doesn't have to be super-fast -- anywhere in the US (I'd even settle for anywhere in my home state), and I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount for it. I want to be able to easily and quickly connect to the internet while I'm sitting at a client's dining-room table. I was just about to sign on for a Ricochet when that product suddenly disappeared from the mark
      • Dude, Cingular rapes you for the data plans. See Sprint or T-Mobile - $15 - $20/mo for unlimited data, at ~dialup speeds (Sprint is actually slightly faster then Dialup). Verizon has the same technology as Sprint, but charges $80/mo for it, and doesn't have the present-yet-mostly-unenforced "no laptops" restriction of Sprint.
    • Its amazing how some companies still dont learn from the dot-com era. Business schools should be required by law to teach people that companies need to MAKE money.

  • already there... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by d_i_r_t_y ( 156112 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:55PM (#7938216) Homepage Journal
    i am already sharing my 1.5Mbps WiFi link to my apartment block for all to use... i have a 16Gb/month cap, and i never get anywhere near that, so as long as people using my connection don't whore like crazy, i don't mind. live and let live i say.

    • Re:already there... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:57PM (#7938243)
      Aren't you concerned that the feds are going to show up at your door because someone was downloading child porn on your connection and they think it was you?

      Seems you're assuming a lot of liability to me.

      • Re:already there... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by pigscanfly.ca ( 664381 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:36PM (#7938514) Homepage
        As a matter of fact its a wonderful idea .
        Have an open connection that any one can plug into , anything does happen (read RIAA file sharing nazis) "it wasnt me . It was any one of a number of people with in a 450 feet radius of my house . Unless they were using a special antenna then it could be a couple of miles" .
        Defense in a bottle :-)
        Drink once .
        Repeat.

        • Re:already there... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 ) <xptical@g3.14mail.com minus pi> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @04:28PM (#7939371)
          Your equipment will still sit in a locked evidince room in the basement of whatever agency decides to persue it. Your home will be invaded by men in combat gear with machine guns. You will be led away with your hands tie-wrapped behind your back. Your computer, router, cabling, telephones, VCR, TiVo, DVD player, etc will all be taken. Your books, bank records, credit card records, and family photos will be taken. Any writable media including (but not limited to) CD/DVD-r/rws, floppies, and home video tapes will be taken. Most of your licensed software will also be taken.

          The stuff will sit in the evidince room for a LONG time. How long? At least until the investigation is closed. They may claim that they will hold it until they have a chance to do a forensic analasys on it, but they can take forever to do that. Your lawyer will tell the judge to give up your stuff. The cops will claim that a murder, rape, or drug case has precidince and they need more time. The judge will side with the cops.

          You will probably never see your stuff agian. If you do, most of the writable media (especially your precious home videos) will have been destroyed by the forensic analasys, which, as far as I can tell, consists of holding a powerfull magnet next to everything you own to see if child porn pics will leap off the disks. Any hardware returned to you will be out-dated and may or may not work as cops have a tendency to turn on your PC and hold the CPU fans still to see what happens.

          Claiming ignorance or even being stupid has never been a viable defense. When it comes down to it, they can't prove you downloaded the thing. But if you don't cooperate, they can still make your life suck.

          Don't just think the prosicutor will say "Oh! You had an open WAP! Our bad; you are free to go." It's not gonna happen. But hey, I'm not bitter or anything.

          • You're right, no doubt about that.

            Interesting, isn't it, that the same country claims to be the most Free in the world?

            -John
            • If you are caught with regular porn in some places, you'd be flogged or worse.

              There is an old saying I'm gonna' paraphrase horribly: The US system is probably the worst system ever put into service...but it's still better than anything else out there.

              I just wish the police had more oversight by third-parties. Allowing them to use intimidation and treating citizens like criminals should not be tolerated in a soceity that touts "innocent until proven guilty by a court of your peers."
              • Yup, you said it right. Unfortunately, being the worst system out there (except for all the others) apparently makes a very large number of US citizens think they've got the right to yell "You traitor!" at anybody who merely suggests at the possibility of improvement. Guarding the guardians (to rape an old latin saying) is indeed an important step to make in improving the system.
              • There is an old saying I'm gonna' paraphrase horribly: The US system is probably the worst system ever put into service...but it's still better than anything else out there.

                actually, i think most people who aren't from the US would say it's just about the worst system there is -- on par with baghdad. oh wait...

                seriously though, a society that can freely carry guns is always going to engender a police force that is 2 steps more violent and ready to kill - they don't want to get shot either.

                here in austra

                • Appearently you are in the grip of paranoia and fear of guns. Cops are not shot often in the US, it happens rarely enough that it makes the news, and flags are lowered to half mask when it happens. For that matter, cops don't normally draw their guns except when at the range for their required practice session. Cops know that bullets can kill someone 3 miles away, and they are trained extensively to not shoot if there is any other option. Sure they can and will, but not often. Most cops who do have

                  • au contraire... maybe you're not familiar [usdoj.gov] with [cdc.gov] the [cdc.gov] statistics [newsmax.com]...

                    in the US of 1998, 100,000 people were shot, a third of these (>30,000) died from their wounds. a youth of 15-24 is 3 times more likely to be shot than the population at large. a household gun is 22 times more likely to shoot someone other than a burglar.

                    here in australia, where only the police (more or less) may have guns, we have on average, 4 gun-related deaths per year. the US has around 13 times our population, but has more than 30,00
                • Moore had some good points:

                  1. Guns don't cause violence.
                  2. US Media instils fear in the populace.
                  3. Populace fear causes violence.

                  Basicly, all the USians are afraid of the 'black man' coming to take their posessions. In response to the 'black man' threat, we buy guns. When we buy guns, our kids shoot each other.

                  Unfortunately, that line of thinking is flawed...or is it? Do the movies we see, the games we play, or the news we watch cause up to be more violent?

                  I personally wish 10 minutes of the news

                  • Unfortunately, that line of thinking is flawed...or is it? Do the movies we see, the games we play, or the news we watch cause up to be more violent?
                    i don't think it's popular culture that leads to violence, per se, although i'm sure it desensitises people *to* violence (which, while obviously not as bad as doing it, is still kindof disturbing... take for instance the blanket coverage of the iraq war -- they may as well have had a scoreboard: us vs them).

                    as an aussie visiting the US, it struck me how pa
      • Assuming a lot of liability...perhaps. Creating a situation that provides plausible denaibility...maybe that is the case.
      • i think you have to have some faith in the basic goodness of your fellow man/women... otherwise society is on a downward spiral, where before you know it, it's as bad as the US, where everyone carries guns and assumes everyone is a clandestine terrorist and invades homes and countries on the preposition that they *might* be dangerous.

    • Re:already there... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by praedor ( 218403 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:44PM (#7938575) Homepage

      But...YOU are paying for your connection. You are sharing your connection because you can AFFORD to. You are also sharing your connection ONLY because, thus far, no one has taken advantage of it to do something illegal (child porn, cracking, "illegal" music downloading bigtime).


      There IS no free internet anywhere. YOU are paying for it, you are merely being generous with your money (giving it to your neighbors, in effect). That's cool as you can obviously afford it. You are hosed when the feds or RIAA comes after you (or your ISP).


      It is NOT a business plan to give away free internet if there is no income stream somewhere. The hardware doesn't make itself, it costs money. The actual connection via an ISP is not free EVER. It costs. I cannot see ANY business doing this (just charities like yourself) UNLESS there is an income stream to cover the costs (plus a profit...making it a business rather than a non-profit organization).

      • You are hosed when the feds or RIAA comes after you (or your ISP).

        Hmm... Since you are sharing your internet connection, in rather the same way that your own ISP does (sharing their backbone connection), would that not also turn YOU into an ISP and provide you with all of the protections involved in being a service provider (not responsible for what goes through your network, only what's hosted ON it) rather than an end user?

        Perhaps if you registered yourself as a home-based business?

        N.
        • In which case, your ISP will charge you out the ass as stated in the TOS. (read "Section 3: Bodily orifices you may be charged from", it's there ;P )

          And remember, unlike an EULA, you likely signed the TOS agreement, so as long as there is a clause about business, you're fscked.

  • Keeping track of hotspots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sempf ( 214908 ) * on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:55PM (#7938221) Homepage Journal
    How are we going to keep track, though? Wear a watch that beeps when there is an internet connection nearby, and stop and check out email? Is there going to be a list? Hell, I can't even find an accurate list of the coffehouses in Columbus that have WiFi!!!

  • Can you say "exploitation"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moth7 ( 699815 ) <mike.brownbill@C ... minus physicist> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:57PM (#7938238) Journal
    This is just asking for the next major worm. If Joe Public can't configure his win box through a nice comfy GUI or update it now and again, he's going to have a hell of a time securing shared WiFi hardware. Sure, it would be nice to be able to say browse the web while waiting for a train or check your e-mail on the bus going into work. What however isn't so nice is the prospect of having your entire local area being compromised and being used as zombies in DDOS attacks and God knows what else. Maybe we should wait until they can protect their own boxes before trusting them as a gateway for someone elses?
    • Seperate and segment your LAN. Second AP for shared wireless connected to a firewall (that blocks everything but http/https possibly), different IPs/subnets on the shared side, etc. Heck, maybe even get a second line in just to share, if you are in that kind of mood - a second phone line, plus dsl service on it here in the boonies where I live is less than $80/mo, including all taxes, fees, etc.

  • Well then, why doesn't he? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hanno ( 11981 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @01:57PM (#7938241) Homepage
    I'm constantly amazed about the fluff he writes.

    If he knows, then fine, he should go ahead and do it, for christ's sake.

    There's a saying in music: Failed musicians become concert organiziers. Failed concert organizers become music critics. (Sorry if "evevent organizer" is the wrong word. English isn't my first language.)

    • His articles are more of a think tank style. Doesn't care about specifics (more than to find out if what he proposes is at least theoretically possible). He just throws these ideas out there...it's the discussion that's started by them that is value in the article.

    • Re:Glenn Fleishman's reply (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mmurphy000 ( 556983 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:55PM (#7938668)
      My biggest problem with the parent's linked-to blog posting is with this:
      Free wireless. It's all over the place. Community groups. Municipalities. Businesses. Groups of businesses. Free wireless is a huge inchoate "movement" in which thousands of locations offer it without any coordination among most of them.
      This forces the "coordination" onto the end user. I've tried using free wireless at hotels, airports, etc. Each requires its own SSID and WEP settings, for valid security reasons, but finding those values and teaching it to the network card is more of a challenge than many people can deal with. So, saying that we'll get broad-area coverage by a mix of a dozen or so big aggregators and umpteen zillion little free hotspots isn't all that practical either. Imagine having to reprogram your cell phone every time you go to a different building -- serious bitheads wouldn't mind, and your average consumer would just avoid cell phone technology. Cell phone networks tended toward oligarchy (a few big-time players) to address this issue and provide semi-universal, no-reconfiguration-required coverage.

      Does Cringely's approach have holes? Sure. It's an article, not a business plan. Skipping the tech details, Cringely's plan boils down to "build a million hotspots -- wherever people want to put 'em up, 'cause they're free -- and the rest of the world will beat a path to your door". With sufficient marketing and technology partnerships, the approach might even work, assuming that all the details that Mr. Fleishman pointed out got addressed.

  • drop in demand? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gid13 ( 620803 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:01PM (#7938268)
    It seems to me that many of the people that would be willing to pay for such a service would then just become hotspots. Wouldn't that cause a very large drop in the demand, and thus the profit?

    • Supply and Demand (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Moth7 ( 699815 )
      It shouldn't do. Personally if I wouldn't wish to rely on somebody else possibly less competent than my less than competent self to keep a WiFi service up and running. After all, if you want something doing right, do it yourself. Besides, those willing to pay for it wouldn't be able to serve whole cities, would they? It would be quite possible that this could generate an increase in demand from those who want the free equipment and cant get a signal where they live - there is afterall only a certain range o
      • No offense, but you obviously haven't read the article.

        The proposed system involves giving free equipment AND free subscriptions to those willing to share their existing connection.

  • Cool idea, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:04PM (#7938286)
    The problem is he doesn't really explain how the company providing all this free equipment is supposed to make enough money for it to be worth their while. The very vague notion that revenue comes from the subscribers who don't share their APs seems to have no mathematical backing at all.

    Now if we threw away the idea of this being a business at all, and just made it a big nation-wide cooperative... THEN it could be interesting. Everyone would have to buy their equipment of course, but that's not a big obstacle - that would be the personal cost of joining this cooperative.

    • Gee maybe like cell phone service companies (Score:4, Insightful)

      by charnov ( 183495 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:16PM (#7938375) Homepage Journal
      You don't really think that cell phone you have cost $100 to make do you? I know the one I got for free cost around $500 to make. How do they make a profit? You don't think that it costs that much for airtime do you?
    • And everyone would have to share their connections, and not be bastards about it.

      Sounds kinda like communism. Would be great if effective safeguards against corrupt jackasses was built in.

      I don't mean to be too harsh though, seriously. It might be possible to build in some such kind of safeguard, in which case it would be amazing.
      • Well in this case I suppose the "corrupt jackasses" are leechers who use tons of bandwidth. In that case, why not just impose a cap of 10KB/s or so? That's plenty for checking email, webpages, or a ssh session.

      • Re:Cool idea, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by praedor ( 218403 )

        The problem with this is the same as the problem with gnutella network and the like. The problem (addressed by game theory, by the way) is that you get a huge number of cheats. Those who take, take, take, but give nothing. In gnutella, that is the overwhelmingly huge number of individuals who ONLY download but provide nothing.

        Without some form of regulation, there is no way to prevent the cheats from being a large fraction of the users (being crackers, spammers, filesharing/music swapping bandwidth hog

        • "Without some form of regulation"

          Bittorrent does okay without any regulation, but that's because of it's Prisoner's Dilemma-style approach. I wonder if there's a good (or even remotely feasible) way to translate that to a system like this.
    • "he doesn't really explain how the company providing all this free equipment is supposed to make enough money for it to be worth their while."

      One would hope that this would become a community project, rather than a commercial one...

      The benefits all accrue to the community, and anyone with a wireless hotspot gains karma [not the slashdot sort] from having it. So what it comes down to is, when does WiFi equipment become cheap enough that someone with an internet connection can buy one when all he's going t

  • good idea (Score:2, Interesting)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 )
    If it's such a great idea, and likely to make vast amounts of money, why isn't Mr Cringely doing it himself?
    • ...like the rest of us, he lacks the large amount of capital that would be required to do it. The residuals from Triumph of the Nerds cannot be all that much.

  • You really wanna do something? Get some (a few hundred) geeks in the same city organised. Hope they're nicely geographically distibuted and all get some wifi equipment (not so expensive these days)...and set it up! Free city-wide coverage :)

    Then get some kind of voice over ip (not the stuff the telco's are trying, I'm talking more like roger wilco; no connections to the traditional networks neccessary) working on palmpilots and ppc....et viola, you won't have to pay for inner-city calls (which makes a big

  • Different model (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:11PM (#7938335)
    The equipment runs about $200 to set up a fancy 802.11 hotspot, probably down to $100 or less shortly. Imagine that one of the 802.11 access point/gateway manufacturers set up the sort of thing needed for this to work -- bandwidth prioritizing for the owner, and filtering of spam/attacks for others.

    Now, say your running Jose's cafe. You have two choices:
    * Set up a hotspot that only users of MegaCorp Hotspot Aggragators can use, for free
    * Set up a hotspot for everyone in your cafe for $200, and advertise "free wireless Internet" and increase traffic.

    Which are you gonna do? Without some profit motive, you'll probably go for the second choice. Especially since in the case of most networks, you want random friends/business clients/etc. who come over to be able to use it, and you want your Dell with built-in wireless not to need a special card.

    I think free wireless would be ubiquitous, if the equipment was set up for more reasonable connection sharing than WAP/no-sharing or no-WAP/security hole.
    • People in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) are coming together to offer free wireless hotspots in local venues. For about 200$, we [ilesansfil.org] install all the needed hardware, give them a little sign/poster, and voila, another free public hotspot for Montrealers.

  • The Napster buisness plan? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:18PM (#7938390)
    Robert X. mentions that his plan would see resistance from ISPs who would cite anti-sharing clauses in their end user contracts, and his explanation of how he'd get arround that is that if everybody's doing it, they can't stop it.

    Well, that was Napster's plan. And, it turns out that's only half right. They couldn't stop P2P, but they could stop Napster and at least put that company out of business. Kazaa is still kicking around, but their business model is purely as a distribution network for spyware, adware and other troublemakers which does scare away a good chunk of the user base.

    In short, this is a pipe dream that will never come true. Universial WiFi is a nice concept, but impossible to execute because the wired network providers behind the hotspots are going to want their cut of the action.
    • I think there is a fundamental diference here. Copyrighted file sharing was illegal even before napster, and that status is not likelly to change in the forseable future. However the connection sharing is not illegal, it is only against the terms of service of some isp's. Competition could perheaps drive all isp's to at least tolerate the practice. How about having your ISP's name included in your ssid? That's a very reasonable compromise. What if the ISP wants an extra 10$ each month to allow you to share
    • "Robert X. mentions that his plan would see resistance from ISPs who would cite anti-sharing clauses in their end user contracts, and his explanation of how he'd get arround that is that if everybody's doing it, they can't stop it... In short, this is a pipe dream that will never come true."

      I'm not entirely sure why you think Cringely's solution wouldn't work?

      "Hello? OneTel? Yes, I'm interested in your expensive, and quite competitive, DSL products... I'd just like to check that I'd be able to run a pu
    • Napster showed us that there was a huge demand for pirated music, a demand that the record companies found to be inherently impossible to cater to.
      If there is a demand for people to share their wireless connections, I think it will be a much easier thing for the ISP's to accomodate.
      I just got hooked up with DSL from Qwest, and the modem I am renting from them has two wireless PC card slots. How hard would it be to loan free wireless equipment (interior and exterior wireless PC cards, and maybe a card for y

  • Where would this be now? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by UPAAntilles ( 693635 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:24PM (#7938428)
    I'm a bit confused...is he saying that people should just share the broadband connections that we have now? Ignoring all the large things like ISP trouble, upload/download caps, contract violations, etc-Wouldn't the vast majority of these be in residential neighborhoods? How is this going to benefit people? I can see a couple scenarios (getting lost, so using it to find directions and get "unlost"), but not enough. The only places I would want to use WiFi would be someplace like a fast-food restaurant, or maybe along an interstate (when I'm not the one driving, of course),in a hotel, or in an airport/train station/subway station. But under his plan, most of these places wouldn't have it. A lot of hotels are already offering this service (a lot for free), fast-food restaurants wouldn't want to spend all that money for extra bandwidth (the McDonald's by my house uses a 56k conn, I know that much, and before anyone jumps on me, being a business, they would have to negotiate a contract allowing sharing of the conn, and that would cost more than your standard hook-up). The "best" way to spread wifi in the places people will use it, as I see it, would be a federally-supported monopoly...and even then, we'd be losing money until people wanted to use wifi. I'm content using the internet at home and hotels at the moment.
    If you build it, they probably still won't come

    • OK, enough's enough. NO hotel offers free wireless. NONE. They cannot. What they are doing is an economic trick. They are paying for a connection to the internet backbone (perhaps leasing a full T1). They have sprung for APs and any other infrastructure. They are not just saying "it's all good, no problem with the money spent", and giving a free connection to patrons. What they are doing is rolling the cost into the cost of a room. You ARE paying for it, just not as a direct "WiFi Fee".

      When you p

      • Okay...the hotel is paying for it...now, I live in Las Vegas, and the hotels in the area that now offer WiFi have not increased their room rates to compensate (all that gambling revenue eats cancels it out easily). So, to the consumer, it is free. The hotels are just trying to cater for business to their hotels (like CES goers this week). I realize that this isn't true for all hotels, but it doesn't matter, I was generalizing, and that wasn't even my point.

  • Did'nt Joltage and Sputnik try the same thing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by puneetb ( 679679 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:30PM (#7938469) Homepage
    Is this really new? Did'nt Joltage (even Nicholas Negroponte was on its board) try the same thing and finally go under? After such a high profile failure and many not so high profile ones, not to mention the liability issues of sharing internet access [what if someone downloads child porn using your network, or breaks into some computers or shares music. Since you are NATing, RIAA sees your IP and comes after you!] , your service agreement with your ISP etc I dont think this model will work.

    Granted Joltage gave only the SW, but the HW components are cheap enough that giving them free is also not going to help.

    The 'hotspot business model' is just running around like a headless chicken...

  • That would target all the wrong places (Score:4, Insightful)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:34PM (#7938498) Journal
    I can''t imagine there is a big demand for a hotspot outside of my house. How would that justify the expense to the company? I want hotspots in places like public parks, and stores where my wife loves to go and make me wait for hours on end (Marshalls is evil).

    • I can''t imagine there is a big demand for a hotspot outside of my house.

      Well, if everyone had a hotspot in their house then we'd have a "hands across America"-type setup, where everyone would be connected to everyone else, with the only expense being electricity.

      How the performance of such a network would be, I don't know. But I really like the idea, cutting out the middleman -- and also, making disrupting the network extremely difficult. If your next-door neighbor's card stops working (or he reb

  • TechTV Story (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Caseyscrib ( 728790 )
    I did not RTFA, but a related story was on Tech-TV. http://www.techtv.com/news/scitech/story/0,24195,3 587957,00.html [techtv.com]

  • Sonic.net's Hotspot Bribe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:42PM (#7938559) Journal
    Sonic.net [sonic.net] provides DSL and dial ISP services. They have a hotspot bribe [sonic.net] service, which lets their DSL customers set up a hotspot and receive 50% of the daily charges for anyone sharing their DSL. So Sonic.net customers can roam, or share DSL with their neighbors, and non-customers can pay a $3.50 per day hotspot usage fee. They don't provide hardware, but just about anybody who runs DSL is geeky enough to buy WiFi, and it's under $100 for access points anyway.
    • As another responder mentioned, Speakeasy does that as well.

      Somewhat OT, but I looked at Speakeasy's site after seeing the reference in the article, and saw a cool deal they have: if you can't currently get DSL, they'll sell you dial-up for $20 a month, and "bank" your payment against future DSL charges. Every month, your future DSL bill goes down $20. Slick.

    • This is mostly what cringely is talking about, you set up a hot spot, and in return, get one free wireless unit to connect.

      If you just want the client unit, you pay, and that pays for the hardware.

      Authetication is done via the custom firmware, so very littly for the user to do after the initial set up.

  • Here's an alternative: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Newer Guy ( 520108 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:43PM (#7938568)

    Here's an alternative: A nonprofit loosely organized nationwide free WIFI network. It would be simple to do too. Everyone that wants to join would simply put stars ** on each side of their SSID name. This would indicate that it's owner is part of the network and others have his permission to borrow his connection. For example: My SSID says: "No Trespassing" (it's a joke). If I wanted to participate in the the open WIFI initiative, I'd simply leave my network open and change my SSID to: "*No Trespassing*".

    Router manufacturers could even code this into their firmware with a bullseye that could be selected to enable this option. If Linksys did this for example, their unabled SSID would still be Linksys. Enable the bullseye and then your SSID would change to *Linksys*.

    Seems simple enough to me.....*anyway*

    • Sure, but SSIDs are long enough that you can put a much clearer string in the name, like "FreeWifi" to make it clear to people who happen by, even who don't know about the convention, that you are ready to have them use it.

      Even better, however, is to have a URL or e-mail address as your SSID. This allows people who see your SSID to mail you to ask about it. I met a neighbour that way.

      Combine the two, and make your SSID freewifi@yourdomain.com, so people can know about it and can also meet you.

  • Simple Matter of Programming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:53PM (#7938651) Journal
    There are about 10 ways to pull this kind of service out of a protocol stack - from simple "don't care who's there" to RADIUS games to IPSEC VPNs to various games with NAT (for roamers who don't mind being stuck behind NAT) to SSL tunnels to HTTP/HTTPS proxies to whatever. Depending on the kind of service you're trying to provide, the user get more or less control of their environment. One of the cleaner approaches is to let guests set up a VPN tunnel to some gateway (either a hotspot provider or just let all ipsec traffic through.) This is safe for the wired host user, prevents problems with spamming, etc., and gives you something to prioritize on if the wireless guests are hogging all your bandwidth, plus it's secure for the wireless guest as well.

    But all of them require somebody to go do the programming work. The centralized approaches have an obvious person to do that, but they require business models. If the cable modem companies weren't suicidally clueless about the data world, they'd offer a $10/month roaming service from any cable modem user that has wireless running. But there are friendlier DSL providers, like Sonic and Speakeasy and to some extent Earthlink, where the users could do decentralized friendly wireless sharing if they wanted because their contracts' terms of service are open.

  • Alternative viewpoint (Score:2, Informative)

    by rajid ( 733937 )
    For an alternative viewpoint, check out Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com]

  • WiFi is only half the equation; TCP/IP = no-go. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mordant ( 138460 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @03:00PM (#7938710)
    It won't work because the WiFi part aside, there's the layer-3 stuff - i.e., the IP addressing, the routing plan, policy-based routing, ACLs, etc. which is necessary in order to get IP connectivity.

    WiFi hotspots have to hook into wired backbones at some point . . . this means that your hypothetical aggregator must somehow backhaul the traffic into his network, and that's the rub. The quality of service will be totally dependent upon whatever the local connectivity circumstances are for the franchisee/WiFi people (overloaded cablemodem system, spotty DSL, whatever) . . . since it won't be practical for your aggregator to roll out, say, his own DSL connectivity nationwide, he'll have to backhaul all the traffic across a VPN tunnel (so now he has to manage millions of VPN connections coming back into a central location across aforesaid spotty connectivity, with all the MTU headaches, etc. associated with that; you can't NAT and NAT and NAT and NAT and expect things to work), and on and on.

    Enterprises and SPs don't have a good grip on managing networks with mere thousands of infrastructure devices . . . scaling this to millions (or even those thousands, given the above constraints) just isn't possible with today's or tomorrow's (same issues w/IPv6) networking technologies.

    The TCP/IP part of it makes the whole thing completely invalid. Sorry.

  • After a bit of thought, I've decided that if I wrote pieces for my 12th grade english class like Robert X. Cringely writes his columns, I'd receive terrible grades.

    Why? His writing never supports its claims with actual evidence beyone the anecdotal. You can't base a business plan off of an afternoon daydream, just the same way you can't "bounce" a Wi-Fi signal over a mountain with a +15dBm power level (see links).

    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020207. html [pbs.org]
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wl [oreillynet.com]

    • Right on, bgelb! Back when he was claiming the passive repeater impossibility, he promised to provide details. Then his son died of SIDS, and everyone gave him space. It's been two years, and he's still writing every week, and he's never provided more information or answered questions about it. I don't mean to sound callous, but if he can feed the bulldog, he can surely provide some details about his miracle repeater.

      I wrote an extensive deconstruction [wifinetnews.com] of his WhyFi essay on my Wi-Fi blog -- in short, he ge
  • Take a good, close look at your AUP from your broadband provider, and see if they have a clause in there that prohibits you from sharing your connection with anyone outside of your personal residence. I've checked the 11 top national providers, and they all have it in their policies, including the two I've used most-recently on the East Coast for my own bandwidth.

    I have a bubble of 802.11b and 802.11g wifi around my house that extends about 1/4 of a mile in radius, from my local equipment in the server roo

  • Then providers would quickly make it against the TOS. In fact, comcast already makes it against their TOS for you to share your connection with anyone else (redistribution of services, etc, etc).
  • How does somebody become a tech pundit? When I use the term, I'm thinking mostly of people like John Dvorak and Robert X. Cringely. I'm sure there are others but those two are certainly the worst offenders. They come out every week and state things that are either completely false or uninformed, make predictions which anyone can figure out will never happen, and advise people to do things which come out of business plans that would've been laughable even in 1999. For this they are considered "visionary.
    • This is why I call myself an "unsolicited pundit." My whole goal in technical writing for print and online is to base what I write on solid facts, experience, and interviews. The "unsolicited" part of my business name is a joke on the fact that most pundits are anointed.

      How do you become a Cringely or Dvorak? Relentless self-promotion (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), great charisma, and massive output of writing and other production. Volume + charisma + promotion = pundit. I lack the charisma and the
  • What happens when customer X, who runs hotspot Y, goes on vacation for a month. Lightning fries the AP. Who fixes the equipment? No way am I giving you the keys to my apartment for free Internet access.
  • Your average person doesn't surf the web in someone else's front yard. People use their laptops at work, at home, at other's businesses if in sales or marketing, at the airport, on the train, in the park etc. Aside from the park possibly, very few of these places are where a private citizen will have a tranceiver that can pick up your laptop. At best this system will allow some people to leech free web service from their neighbors, without giving anything back. I won't get into the issue of who's going to p
  • I mean, all you need is a wardriving program and you can find free WiFi access wherever you go. That's the whole problem with trying to commercialize WiFi...there are too many "competitors," both business and non.

    I do think that the modified WiFi systems he proposes, with bandwidth throttling, might be a good idea just in general, but I don't think you need to give them away for free.
  • As many have pointed out, you don't want to give free hotspots and access to people who set up a hotspot where nobody else will use it.

    Nor do you really need to give free access to every person in the network, though you might give reduced priced access.

    There is a simple solution though, which is not revenue sharing directly. Reward based on the amount of _paid_ access to their hotspot.

    If you get decent amounts of paid access to your hotspot, you get free access everywhere else. If you get limited pai

  • Why noy... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by burns210 ( 572621 ) <maburns@gmail.com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @05:04AM (#7943494) Homepage Journal
    The idea of shared wifi is to get wireless acess that leads to a wired connection that eventually leads to the internet(a series of wired networks sharing services). Why not move some of the shared services of the internet, and tune them for direct wifi use? Instead of needing a wifi connected to so WAN link to get access to slashdot.org, why not have palms, laptops, etc. use a combo webserver/cache + wifi? where they cache their visited sites, along with being able to host their own, and if you are in range, your network grows to encompass their websites...

    So if you have a 512MB CF card, you could carry half a gig worth of websites, so that next time you pass by a palm pilot user, they could view all 1/2 gig of websites you have, as if they were via a normal connection to the internet...

    This direct wifi p2p network would also work well with a customized IRC... anyone within signal distance would automaticly join the #wifi channel of the default server. it would ofcourse be a p2p irc server(where certain messages would have to be relayed, possibly), but it would allow for an entire internet cafe to join a virtual chatroom, just by being within range of eachother.

    Services such as Freenet that create a more secured internet capable of websites and similar traffic, are getting close. And i2p (invisible internet project v2) might even hit it on the head, but all we need is some program, or api, or protocol (i am not sure how exactly it would be best to communicate directly to another wifi device) that lets us provide internet services (irc, im, www, etc.) by connecting directly with a wifi device in place of the traditional server.

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