Corporate Encouragement For Sharing Your WiFi

anagama writes "Conventional wisdom is that one should lockdown wifi, your ISP doesn't want you to share your connection, that person checking email outside the coffee shop ought to be arrested. The UK ISP BT is offering an alternative model. The company will encourage its three million broadband users to pick up a FON router and start sharing signals. 'For BT, the move makes its broadband offering more useful to customers, who can access the Internet from more places, and BT doesn't need to build out a new wireless network itself. BT's Gavin Patterson, a managing director, holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain." "We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny." '"

Re:Sure, I'll share my broadband...

[JamesRose]

That's the point, BT has BT openzone, so at places like airports BT gives wi-fi access, if you partipate in this scheme, you let people use your broadband, and in return you can use theirs and BT's. It's like communism, but the good kind :P. Of course you can choose not to, and you pay a little to accesss the wi-fi area.

RIAA

[nurb432]

Must be screaming in pain now.. Even less of a way to determine who downloaded/uploaded something that is *isp sponsored*.

Cool.

Not only in the UK

[msmikkol]

Wippies in Finland (http://www.wippies.com/) is doing a similar thing. They give a free WiFi box (among other things) to users who operate an access point and share their broadband connection with other Wippies members.

Anti-RIAA

[Nom du Keyboard]

Talk about the perfect excuse that it wasn't me sharing music over my WiFi router. It was someone else -- and BT make it all possible. Certainly an RIAA nightmare in the making.

Umm, I'm not impressed

[cheros]

I got that FON adaptor with a Skype phone, and it took me all of 30 seconds to decide not to install it.

Given the current security climate I'm really not going to give someone a chance to (a) identify where I live and if I'm around (look at their status info on the web - having an access point means you've got kit to steal) and (b) to put a remote controlled listening device on my traffic. The FON adaptor is a small Linux box, and I don't know what it does. Worse, someone else controls it and can flash the thing at any time.

Nope. Not interested in contributing to an 802.11 version of Echelon :-).

Re:WTF?

[MikeFM]

That's why we invented ssl, ssh, etc. AP security is mostly an illusion anyway and at least IMO it should not be allowed as it's hijacking a scarce public resource (the frequency being used) and making it into a private resource. Very annoying if you live in a crowded area where everyone is trying to run their own little AP and it's to congested to work well and you can't share because they are all locked.

I prefer a more Grassroots approach...

[wellingj]

Why do we need a teloco to allow us to do this? DIY is always better. [meraki.com]