Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors

A few days ago, Dan Rutter (the Dan in "Dan's Data") published an interesting idea for extending the sort of philanthropic technical pranksterism that spawned throwies by applying the same approach to Wi-Fi. That means, looking what he hopes is not too far down the road, creating Wi-Fi repeaters that are cheap enough to deploy on the sly and frugal enough with power to run on solar power or cheaply replaceable batteries. But as he says, "If you've got a lot of spare money, a ladder and no respect for private property, though, you could already be stealthily deploying Open-Mesh or other such gadgets all over your neighbourhood." In some cities at least, you'd be hard pressed to ever avoid at least one available wireless access point, but that's not the experience for most people, most places -- which bears correction.

Re:I like it

[MindlessAutomata]

Service is intended for one household only. And you're going "OMG GREEDY ISPS!!!" because they want to make money? It's their service! The greedy bastard here, is you. Newsflash: It's not your service. Feel free to make a personal wireless network that doesn't connect to the ISP's network, but don't be stealing their service "just because you can". Bad as the media companies for wanting "control over networks"? Here they'd just stop it because it's people are breaking the terms of agreement. It's NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMON CABLE THEFT. Oh, do you support stealing that, too?

Re:ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, are you from the past?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=fon&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Isn't this, essentially, what FON already do?

[SteveDob]

My UK ISP already provide for 'municipal' wi-fi via an affiliation with FON. By opening up part of my spectrum, I get to piggyback my mobile devices on some other member's wi-fi when I need to.

The only additional item here seems to be not getting ISP permission to do what they are happy to give permission for anyway. Rebellion this isn't.

Not all ISP's suck

[GeorgeS]

I use Speakeasy for my service and they actually have a program that allows and encourages you to share your net connection over a wi-fi setup.
They also encourage you to charge for it, but there's no reason why it can't be done for free if you'd like.

http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/ [speakeasy.net]

Re:I like it

[ceoyoyo]

Take a look at that small print in your terms of service. The same one that says you can't share your connection. There's almost certainly some kind of limit, even if it's a fuzzy, unspecified one.

Or, if you like the empirical approach, run something that maxes out your connection and leave it running until you get a phone call/e-mail/cut off.

Re:Stealing & More

[zippthorne]

Yes, precisely like a buffet.

It's not even an analogy. It's literally the pricing scheme adopted by the ISPs.

They charge "per person" with the expectation that the average person will take only so much. But that assumption goes all to heck if people start sub-letting their buffet plates.

If you wanted "all you (and everone you want to call 'friend') can eat," you should have bought that plan. Not the "all you can eat" plan, which assumes that you'll be the only one doing the eating.

Re:Am I missing something?

[zippthorne]

an amp is useless unless you have one at both ends. If you transmit at 10W or 100W, plenty of people will be able to hear you that you won't be able to hear unless they also are transmitting at 10W or 100W. (and if you can hear them, then you didn't need the full power for them to hear you.)

Now you *could* use a very fancy antenna system, and combine a high-power dipole with an array (or virtual array using DSP) of highly directional antennas with overlapping coverage over the same area as your dipole.

But that gets expensive rather quicly.

Re:I like it

[drinkypoo]

I really like the idea that this guy has, but I hate to think about the crazy ISPs would release on us if people started doing this.

Some ISPs have account types explicitly intended for sharing, like Speakeasy.