At some point in the past HMM Meganet wrote: > Are you a communist or sick? Today people and companies work for money. > Before blowing out such a crap you should spend some money, if you have, and > build a company and really do what you say here and then we see if you still > do it for free. When somebody offers something for free he has other > interests but nothing so far is for free.
Communist? sounds more like a cooperative anarchist who is looking to to see distributed control rather than the oligopoly we now currently have. Or perhaps a capitalist business owner seeing that free wireless service at his cafe will give him an edge over competition. I don't see anything communist there. Now towards the end of your message I see some hope. You understand that there is no such thing as a free beer. What the argument here is that wireless internet will become a true infrastructure like the highway system, in a way that you don't play each time you get on every road. Sometimes you may pay for the use of a special toll road or a bridge but these are the exceptions, and that is fine. Now why do we pay for roads with our taxes and vehicle registration fees? I don't argue because I realize that the existence of these services is good for us all in the long run by reducing the cost of other goods, or letting us increase the potential market of products. I would really like to see free internet at cafes like you see free water and free restrooms available at most today. To this end I am dedicated to seeding a few with my own $ to help with hardware and infrastructure, hopefully this will bring in customers who will but more coffee and pastries while they are there. Hopefully not sitting at a cafe taking up limited seating for hours without buying anything. Those are the true parasites who don't understand the cafe is providing the service in exchange for your business. Cliff >> |Yessir, Boingo is a smart company. Make people pay for something they >> |can get for free: Internet access. In the coming years, Internet access >> |will become as free as water, and available at nearly the same amount of >> |locations as water is. Okay, not quite. >> >> I wouldn't count on this. During the transition of the internet from > academic >> and government/support use to public access the entities that were to > become >> the wireline ISPs were quite inventive in finding ways to interpose > themselves >> (and their fees) between the net and the end user. Initially they > leveraged >> the old notion of authorized users to claim that you had no right to > connect >> to the new and improved internet unless you were their customer. Then > they >> created routing cabals to insure that your routes would not be carried > unless >> you were in the club. Much of this was done in the name of technical > necessity, >> but the zeal with which they went after "indirect customers" (both in > contract >> terms and in practice) suggests otherwise. At the time I (and I assume > many >> others) had hoped that the internet would evolve in a more mesh-connected >> pattern with access being "free" in the sense that you would have to pay > only >> for the wire to a friendly partner. But deviation from a strict hierarchy >> threatened ISP profits, and between contract terms and peering agreements >> they made it virtually impossible to "just connect": even if you could > find >> someone who didn't mind risking their connection by violating their > service >> contract you couldn't route to your own addresses through them. >> >> Now with wireless the medium has changed but the politics haven't. > (Granted >> there has also been a technical paradigm shift in the sense that nobody > expects >> to have and route their own address space, and this makes control of > routes >> less significant. But that's in the nature of a small silver lining in a > bad >> cloud of lost functionality.) In any case, just because the cost of the >> (virtual) wire may seem to have fallen to zero, don't assume the ISPs will >> roll over. The cost of the wire was never the real obstacle. All the > same >> arguments that were used the first time around are still available plus > there >> are some new ones: the spectrum has to be managed by professionals for > the >> good of everyone or chaos and interference will result, a > randomly-connected >> network allows bad guys to be too anonymous, think of the children, etc. > So >> maybe Boingo is smart after all. Profit in the ISP business has > historically >> come from making people pay for something that would be mostly free were > it >> not for the efforts of the companies making the profit... >> >> Dan Lanciani >> ddl@danlan.*com >> -- >> general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> >> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > -- > general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> > [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > -- "An eye for an eye and the whole world ends up blind." --- Mahatma Gandhi -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
