WiFi Hotspots to Cost Wireless Carriers $12B

j.e. writes "Commercial WiFi hotspots and open WiFi networks will take about $12 billion out of wireless carrier revenue pie, says Starategy Analytics. With high prices of mobile data services from wireless carriers, the users are more prone to use a cheap WiFi connection, if one is available."

Having used Cingular's EDGE plan.

[Eunuch]

I used the EDGE from Cingular wireless data plan. $80 (0x50 dollars) a month! It worked decent but the worst part was the latency. I was getting 1-2 second latencies. Do not try to game with it at all. Yet I'd still like a single everywhere-network rather than dealing with lots of accounts with various wi-fi hotspots. If they could just get the latency down and improve reception (if your cell is showing half power don't even bother with trying data).

Don't think so

[DustyShadow]

I won't buy wireless service from a provider and this has nothing to do with wi-fi hotspots. I've never even used a wi-fi hotspot. The main reason that I won't buy wireless service from a provider is because of the insane price. I'm sure most people are in my boat.

Re:WIMAX

[merreborn]

An open hotspot with WIMAX-class range would attract an awful lot of leachers in any tech-savvy neighborhood. Likeley far more than most residential broadband connections could handle.

I doubt we'll ever see many free, open WIMAX hotspots. Open WiFi hotspots only really work because the limited range effectively limits the number of people that can leach any such connection to a handful.

WIFI from the bottom up?

[Raindeer]

Whenever I hear discussions on Wifi hotspots I get the idea that we're building wifi connections the wrong way round. We're building wifi on the open road, that sometimes reaches into our houses/businesses. We could do it from the bottom up, based on the wifi access points in peoples houses.

How hard would a standard be, which would make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point, maybe with a VLAN solution. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit"