Hi Jay! On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 20:12, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > On an unrelated topic, I see from Sifry's Alerts that they've abandoned > their revenue-sharing idea for Sputnik. From what I can see, that sort > of erases the Unique Selling Proposition for talking potential hotspots > into the idea. Someone tell me why I'm wrong, since David apparently > doesn't follow his own comment boards...
Hmmm, that must be an oversight. I usually try to follow up when people ask intelligent questions, must have missed that one. It really came down to this: We couldn't figure out a way to make money doing the joltage/boingo thing, i.e. get people to set up hotspots and then do revenue shares with the hotspot operators. Essentially, there are two big problems with the model: 1) AUPs. Most inexpensive wireless broadband access have some pretty restrictive Acceptable Use Policies, and they usually include a "no sharing your bandwidth" provision. Of course, the way around this is to work out deals with the cable co's and ILECs so that we give a revenue share back to them as well. Unforunately, the slices of the pie keep getting slimmer and slimmer, even if you assume that you can work a deal with the local monopoly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H broadband provider. 2) Customer Service. Know the cornerstone reason why AOL was so profitable for so many years? Because they perfected the art of eliminating customer service calls. This is the bane of so many thin-margin businesses (see point 1 above). One call to your 800 number can blow your profit on that customer for the month, or even the year. Now factor into the equation that you don't control AP placement, coverage, equipment, or internet uplink, and the customer service issues start to look VERY unattractive. Think about what happens when someone is paying you $19.95/month, getting great access via their neighbor's DSL connection, and then their neighbor decides to move. All of a sudden you have a dissatisfied customer, and absolutely no way to control or predict when these situations will arise. Have it happen enough times and your reputation is totally shot. So, we decided to change our model. We still believe in secure authenticated roaming, and we still believe in community networking, all we did was remove the subscriber fee and revenue share part of the model. This way, people can set up nodes, and can easily particiapte in a worldwide network of free community nodes as well. If you want to be a commercial WISP, great, more power to ya, we're glad to sell you the infrastructure and management software that will turn you into a WISP. If you want to deply secure 802.11 networks across your enterprise, you can take proven technology and authenticate against your chosen single-sign-on system, be it RADIUS, LDAP, NDS, Active Directory, or whatever, and the APs enforce policy, like bandwidth shaping and per-user firewalling based on that policy as well. I hope that further clarifies what we at Sputnik did, and where we stand in relation to all the great community network initiatives out there. Dave -- David L. Sifry GPG Key: http://www.sifry.com/david/key.html Key Fingerprint: 7E60 4EDE EB5F AA2D 2F25 8CD3 FE17 C4F8 BDE8 D1B0 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
