Seth wrote: >Oh I understand. That was why I mentioned it. >The problem (as we've run into before in >discussions here on the list) is that the >infrastructure costs are pretty high, and I truly >wonder if a 'free' service can be done long term, >or in any organized fashion.
Are the infrastructure costs that high? What I've been thinking about is more of a movement of garage computer hobbyists, much like your average LUG. Basically a home user who happens to have decent bandwidth, say a DSL to their house, that decides to make say 10k or 20k available to any public user. So the potential target of a node admin would be a home user who has bandwidth. They might want to buy a card to handle the routing and find some old box to hook it up to, is there more infrastructure that I'm not thinking about? I guess the difference between a guerilla wireless network and a corprate, or psuedo-public (local-government?) network would definatly be security. For a citizen/hobbyiest build guerilla network I could care less about security. As long as the wireless access point issolated the wireless devices from the internal network that the access point might be hooked up to, I wouldn't really care what the end user was doing with the connection, or if I did care, I could install/use some logging software to monitor activity a bit, then block a card if I felt the need. I'm sure starbucks, or anyone else would not be so trusting... >I was discussing this today with KBob, in fact, >and trying to figure out a good way to >track/charge, since so many spoofing/sharing >possiblities arise. >I'm really interested how Starbucks plans on >doing this, among others who plan on selling >access. I'm still mulling it over, and would >welcome ideas people think of, even if only to >play devil's advocate so we can rule them out... >Seth Jim
