Awesome idea for wireless internet

[nintenho]

Or they might be prodded into action by an Argentine-born entrepreneur named Martin Varsavsky. The veteran founder of two successful telecommunications companies, Varsavsky has recently launched a venture that plans to cover the globe with Wi-Fi through what he calls, with typically revolutionary brio, a "people's network." His model is not the giant telecom companies with their expensive satellites and towers. His model is the implicit reciprocal arrangement that has evolved between my anonymous neighbor and me. Varsavsky wants to transform the ad hoc secret sharing of neighborhood Wi-Fi into a global quilt, stitched together by ordinary users. But this is not a purely bottom-up effort. In Varsavsky's model, the people will do the stitching, but they'll buy the thread from a company called Fon.

The ingenious core of Varsavsky's plan for Fon lies in the way the system adjusts for both altruistic and commercial motivations among "the people." The world is already populated with thousands of open Wi-Fi hot spots maintained by people who share their bandwidth because they're committed to the open sharing of information. Fon calls those generous souls Linuses, after the patron saint of open-source software, Linus Torvalds. But Varsavsky adds a clever twist: Even the Linuses have an added incentive to join the Fon network. If they open their bandwidth to anyone who wants to hop on, they can take the same liberties at any other Fon hot spot in the world. Give and you shall receive.

What if you want to make a buck off sharing your Wi-Fi network? Fon has a category for you as well—in company parlance, you're a "Bill" (after a certain Bill Gates). Bills can sign up for Fon and charge their neighbors for access: approximately $12 per day or $50 per month. Bills take 50 percent of the cut, but if they stumble across another Fon network when they're away from home, they'll have to cough up the cash to sign on, unlike the Good Samaritan Linuses.

The third category of user is called an Alien—someone who doesn't maintain his or her own network but merely piggybacks on Fon hot spots. For Aliens, Fon is a simple pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi service, not unlike the hot spot providers you find today in airports and hotels and Starbucks.

http://www.discover.com/issues/jun-06/departments/emerging-tech/

Genius.

Wasn't sure which forum to put this in.

 

[KimB]

Well, the only problem I can see with this sort of thing going large-scale is long-distance sustained bandwidth.

 

[nintenho]

Well, the only problem I can see with this sort of thing going large-scale is long-distance sustained bandwidth.

That doesn't seem like a big problem.

 

[DudeMiester]

If you setup all the wi-fi accessing points with routing tech, then you could limit the need for too many massive backbones. If you are sending a message and the recipiant is logged on a Fon enabled Wi-Fi across the city, then it could bounce the message that way without required an ISP. This would probably save the providers a good amount of cash.

 

[Sage]

brilliant!

(bill, of course)

 

[bloodbob]

Pure genius this could save ISP so much as instead of building fibre links they could just use all the bandwidth of this free community project! ( cause surely ISP will give full priority to incoming traffic going directly to their customers so they fit the linus category )

But frankly von's idea are stupid because the only way it could work is if Von controller their hardware ALA Skype. Skype can use 100% of you bandwidth and CPU usage ( read the EULA ) for their own commerical purposes.

 

[Guden Oden]

I foresee amazingly crappy pings should this harebrained idea ever catch on... You'd end up having like A MILLION HOPS from one end of a continent to another. Methinks this network would quickly collapse under the weight of its own immense complexity should it ever expand to cover a significant amount of available wifi hotspots out there.

Just thinking of all the packetloss that's bound to occur when people suddenly restart their PCs or a wifi router loses its connection due to interference or otherwise borks up and so on makes me get a whopper of a headache.

Call me an idiot if you like, but I don't think I'd like to wait three minutes for a packet round trip from here to the B3D server farm when I hit that 'submit' button after writing a post... Thanks, but no thanks.

 

[KimB]

Well, after a bit more thought, I don't think this sort of thing is meant to provide anything more than to expand hotspots, and will be relatively short in range. But even just hooking up an entire city may prove deterimental to latency and packet integrity.