Hi Patrick, > I would argue you have not right to do so, even if that stock cost > only 1 cent.
So, I'm glad you are not my provider, then. > If, however, your usage you pay for is fixed, say capped at 2gig, > then you could offer it for your friends. My cost for driving my car is dominated by the purchase price and falling value of the car, plus insurance, which all together is $300/month whether I drive it or not. Then comes gas, which for my car amounts to $12 per 100 miles, whether I'm alone or have two passengers. So even though I pay for gas, my economy is not affected at all by bringing passengers. The only difference is that the bus or train company loses their ticket money. Owning a car is quite expensive, but driving is really cheap, even at EUR 1/litre ($3.8/gallon), and filling the empty seats really doesn't cost anything. For the broadband that I subscribe to, I suspect that the prices set a few years ago were based on an overly optimistic development of the subscriber base. My current $20/mo for 10 Mbps ethernet is now hiking up to $30/mo. There still is no cap, but even if a 1 Gbyte/month cap was introduced, I would not fill that. The ISP is free to set the price or cap they want, but they would also have to fear losing customers. The fine thing, though, is: This is an ethernet (CAT5 TP) installed by the ISP (thank you, this was 1999) in all 90 apartments of my coop, connecting in the basement to the municipal fibre network, and through that to the ISP's backbone. If the ISP goes bankrupt, the ethernet LAN goes to the coop (hey, nice contract), and the municipal fibre stays in place. All the coop has to do, is to get another uplink from another ISP, or from whoever takes over the bankrupt ISP. No matter how it goes, this is a win for me. With this coop well organized since 1947, the economy of scale is already in place. The marginal cost (to me or the ISP) of moving a few extra bytes is neglectible. Did I tell you Sweden is run by its coops? It's like Minnesota. Do I always have two passengers in my car? No. And how many people actually freeride on my broadband? Nobody does it regularly, since my closest neighbors don't have WLAN clients. Plus it's cheap enough for the neighbors to get their own broadband subscription. So, what's the real problem with telling people that they can use my bandwidth for free? There is no problem. But it makes good headlines. And James Stevens of the London group "Consume the Net" knows that a whole lot better than me. That's good marketing. It's like when Terry Schmidt installs free WLAN access in New York's Bryant Park, a place that Garrison Keillor (of Minnesota) on this week's "Prairie Home Companion" calls "one of the loveliest spots in the city", http://phc.mpr.org/performances/20021130/note.shtml Give him a WLAN client card, and he will say "hotspot" next time. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk�ping, Sweden tel +46-70-7891609 http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/ -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
