Corporate Encouragement For Sharing Your WiFi 173
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." '"
Sure, I'll share my broadband... (Score:2, Insightful)
...but will BT pay for it?
The only way i see this working would be if organizations were compensated for sharing. Not just "encouraged". It'd be nice to put some of the excess on our fiber circuits to good use.
Re:Sure, I'll share my broadband... (Score:5, Interesting)
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A little? You've never seen Openzone's prices, have you? They don't charge a little, they charge a hell of a lot. The minimum spend is £6 ($12), for which you get a whopping 60 minutes of (in my limited experience) 56k-modem speeds and timeouts. So, if you stop for a coffee, check your email and read slashdot for a bit the net access will have cost you three times as much as the coffee.
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A little? You've never seen Openzone's prices, have you? They don't charge a little, they charge a hell of a lot. The minimum spend is £6 ($12), for which you get a whopping 60 minutes of (in my limited experience) 56k-modem speeds and timeouts. So, if you stop for a coffee, check your email and read slashdot for a bit the net access will have cost you three times as much as the coffee.
You don't have Starbucks in Britain, do you? That would be about the same price of coffee there.
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GP said communism, not "Communism". You know, the kind where you just share for the good of all, not the one about dictatorship of the proletariat and other nasty stuff.
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Yeah, that kind of "communism" is called "capitalism", since it is based on the actions of free actors working with their private property. Capitalists can (and often do) choose to share some of their stuff "for the good of all", even without getting an immediate ROI, and it's still capitalism.
Some communism might manifest itself as "goodnes
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Yes. [fon.com] Summary: When somebody accesses the Internet through your connection, they pay for it, and you get half.
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Re:Who pays the bills when the RIAA comes knockin' (Score:2)
If this were the United States, you would be perfectly safe (theoretically) so long as you comply with the DMCA safe harbor provisions. However, doing that is a pain in the ass. I think you're probably safe anyway, since you're just extending someone else's network and they are sti
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Actually, McMartin was 20 years ago. These days it's "guilty even after proven innocent" (you'll just be "released on a technicality" and somehow manage to accidentally slip and fall into a noose your neighbors hung from a tree in your front yard).
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Not for free. Charging extra users. (Score:3, Informative)
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In fact, this is potentially an answer to the cost problems in setting up large-scale wireless access that have been featured here on
Re:Not for free. Charging extra users. (Score:4, Informative)
Other "Foneros" can access the public channel for free, while non-Foneros can pay a few dollars a day to use the access points.
"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."
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Fon has three types of users: Linux, Bill, and Alien. If you sign up as a Linux and share your wifi you get free wifi at any other Fon access point.
If you are a Bill you make a bit of money when another Bill or Alien, logs onto your Fon access point. Conversely if you roam onto another Fon AP you are expected to pay at a reduced rate.
An Alien is anyone who is not part of the Fon network. They can still access any Fon AP but they have to pay to do it.
My point is tha
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WTF? (Score:1)
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Sharing anything causes an increased security risk. The more hops data makes, the more vulnerable it is. The most vulnerable place typically being where it first enters a network.
The question then becomes can BT manage these new security risks well enough to keep customer satisfaction at
A solution for the muni-wifi conundrum? (Score:1)
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That's how San Fran et all should have done it (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, you would have the redundancy of having multiple choices of APs in a given area, so if one goes down for whatever reason, you can still choose another.
It's almost like the equivalent of swarm intelligence, but applied to wifi.
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Even better, how about roaming?
You don't ever want to have to stay in JUST ONE coffee shop just because SP3 is downloading.
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Get a T1 or T3, use a wireless mesh to spread it, everyone's happy.
Unfortunately, although I don't know it to be fact, I think both my work ISP (DSL) and my home (cable) ultimately use shoddy ATT copper which was the root cause of both ISP's to be intermittent for that 2 week period. So, if I were to get a T3 it w
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this should be stopped dead in its tracks! (Score:5, Funny)
Some US providers try/tried too... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.sonic.net/hotspots/ [sonic.net]
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/ [speakeasy.net]
The end of the world is nigh! (Score:1)
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it's a good idea in all (Score:1)
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How much is that in real money [google.com] then?
Hey! How do you get the cute link without the [google.com] shit?
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Now they're back again - looks like a slashdot glitch.
RIAA (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool.
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They also allocate 512KB more bandwidth to your link while other people are using it, and only allow the other people to use this, which is quite neat.
[1] In my defence, I did this before it was on
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Well, my wifi is still wide open.
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Will you?
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Like Mohamed Atta and his pals?
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Your bandwidth is limited by your provisioning file. To change the bandwidth you need to get a new Prov. file. To get a new provisioning file, you need to reboot your modem.
Yeah, just what I want, my modem randomly rebooting to fuck with my bandwidth caps when I'm downloading something or playing a game. Thanks, but no thanks BT.
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Wi-Fi proof of use (Score:1)
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Is it BT's business to make the police's job easier?
As it stands, the assumption is that an open wireless network is not an invitation to use it freely. Hence the recent decision. If BT fill the count
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Obviously, we don't trust the "inside" of our network, but as well as providing a public service, some plausible deniability is useful
Not only in the UK (Score:2, Interesting)
So lets see.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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but no matter how you look at it you're still splitting your pipe
No you're not. That's the entire point of this system. When other people are connected, BT (who own almost all of the ADSL infrastructure in the UK, including the last mile) will allocate another 512KB of bandwidth to your connection. This will then be split between the other people who are using your connection.
I just had a quick look at TFA, and apparently it wasn't the same article I read earlier today detailing this scheme, which made no mention of FON but did explain the extra bandwidth provisio
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I wouldn't be surprised if BT own less than half the ADSL infrastructure in the UK now. Sky/Easynet, AOL, Tiscali/Pipex, Carphone Warehouse, Be, C&W/Bulldog and Orange all have their own LLU infrastructure in a significant number of exchanges, starting with the busiest ones of course.
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Also, exchanges in cities are the ones most likely to have been through LLU as I understand it (and as you imply). Cities are the places most likely to already have Wi-Fi coverage, so the fact that you're likely to get more BT customers out in the countryside where there it's less likely you'll find a standard hotspot would seem to another benefit of the scheme.
BT's FAQ (Score:3, Informative)
Anti-RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
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wow (Score:2)
Just two questions... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) with the ever growing list of people getting done for illegal activity, ie downloading mp3s/illegal porn/'hacking' etc., will you be exempt from any charges relating to criminal activity through someone using your router?
2) is the broadband service provided truly unlimited?
I can't see many people in their right minds signing up to such a service if they weren't protected from neighbours doing heavy downloading and the drive-by wifi'ers downloading stuff deemed illegal. Because on one end of the scale I wouldn't want additional charges for bandwidth use or have the speed restricted due to too someone else using it too much, and the other end I wouldn't want to be arrested because someone else used my internet connection through the wifi router for criminal activities.
Re:Just two questions... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, their access to the internet will be through a separate channel, so it is easy to identify that the access was through the visitor channel.
Legal immunity for sharers (Score:2)
Okay, good job ... (Score:2)
Umm, I'm not impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
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
I prefer a more Grassroots approach... (Score:3, Interesting)
This makes so much sense... (Score:2)
Would someone notify company officials that I have commenced holding my breath?
Risky Business? (Score:2)
I mean, one of the nice aspects of having NAT and a "firewall" is additional security on your network. Now we are expected to let strangers with god knows what on their PC's connect to our networks and poke at our "special" ports.
I for one don't share my special ports with just anyone.
Of course for the really paranoid you can put a nat between your wifi router and the rest of your network, but that just seems to be a bit much.
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Linksys gives specific instructions on how to cascade a second wireless router [slashdot.org] in order to create a public WAP with a private WAP behind it. So, it'll cost you like $50 to set it up.
Hide your router in a lake! (Score:2)
June 29 2007 - Fon VoIP network being disrupted by protest over Wi-Fi adverts [theregister.co.uk]
And there's still a heap of wifi users who have hidden their router in a lake [fon.com]
Happened in France last year (Score:2)
http://blog.fon.com/en/archive/business/fon-and-neuf-cegetel-begin-rollout-of-new-joint-service.html [fon.com]
Re:How hte hell (Score:5, Funny)
RTFM. Slashdot doesn't delete posts because Taco doesn't believe in deleting posts. There are two ways I know of for a post to disappear:
"We" can't "block" "this guy" from "concievably" posting, for several reasons:
My advice to you is that you delve deep into your user configuration page and fix it so that you don't see AC posts or -1 Troll posts at all. Alternatively, type up a bogus DMCA takedown notice claiming the shit-eating first post as your own work. Before you can even click "Send", Taco will be knocking at your door wearing nothing but a pair of see-through panties and handcuffs, eager for you to administer his "punishment" for being a "bad boy".
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Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner.. (Score:3, Insightful)
But what really annoys me about your comment is the shear stupidity of it. Is the UK a nazi-esque state? no. If it were would the media be able to report about when the police did make a bad call and kill an innocent man? would the independent police complaints commission investigate? would it be possible to criticise the government at all?...
So tell me how many death camps does the UK have? I can count... none.
Calling th
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Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are fucking joking, right?
Percentages, is it? OK. How many people wear backpacks in London? Millions. How many people run for a train? Millions. Of those, how many are suicide bombers? Four so far. So, shoot anyone wearing a backpack who is running for a train, on the off-chance they might be a bomber?
Moreover, despite the initial lies put about by the police, de Menezes was not carrying a bag of any kind. Nor was he wearing a heavy coat.
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As I understood it, the police lied about him running from them, and about him having jumped the ticket barrier (he paid with his Oyster card like anyone else), but he did run once he reached the platform and saw the train there.
Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner.. (Score:2)
As for shooting suspects, the example you give is over two years old. At the time, it was a huge scandal
Re:Since there's a camera on every street corner.. (Score:2)
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