While leveraging an existing SOHO/business AP for this certainly gives you distribution - considering that most of us would deploy them with internal antennas and little or no external exposure...they would not be good hotspots/hotzones.
If these SOHO AP's had external exposure there is the issue of breeching the internal LAN - and that's not going to be allowed to happen - not on my watch. If you're talking about adding an AP and external antenna specific for external only use and routing bandwidth off the LAN for the project - well - that sounds compelling - IF you have the right router, the right configuration and some incentive for the business to participate in the scheme - incentive = $$. I could do this ad hoc if I convince my router guy to reconfigure to accomodate this and management would be none the wiser unless/until there is business impact (hack, virus, etc.) - BUT - you cannot count on ad hoc APs without a solid legal document so that washes the business plan as far as investors, etc. IF our IAP provided some incentive to partner into a shared bandwidth agreement for a discounted fee on our T-1 I might go for it - but - business impact again - that means someone has to spring for the right router gear to make it play right. A Cisco 17xx won't cut it. A LinkSys 'SOHO' router won't cut it. So that takes you to the carriers - and if CW, PacBell/SBC, Qwest, Verizon, etc. were going to cut these kinds of deals why would they need 'us' ?? I like the IDEA but the implementation formalities SUCK on a business plan. No one I know of has succeeded in such ventures unless they OWN the network... -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
