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Wireless anywhere.. I'm thinking of writing the following

6 points by contactdick ↗ HN
I live in a block of flats with about 30 different units and to me it's insane and wasteful that we all pay an individual monthly fee to get internet and no one uses anywhere near bandwidth.

I'm thinking of writing a small program to do the following.

1) You can donate your access point to the community 2) This gives you access to other peoples wireless access points in the community 3) Every time someone uses your access point, you get that much bandwidth as credit 4) If not enough people are using your access point, you can pay for more credit at a very low rate.

Thoughts?

9 comments

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brk
I like the idea, but I think you're over complicating it with the whole billing stuff.

I would setup a system where for $7/mo. you can have up to 3 MAC addresses registered in the system. All the AP's would be configured with a known SSID and wpa2 key and the 3 device Mac addresses are registered in each persons access point. (you might have to run dd-wrt or tomato on the routers).

contactdick
Cheers for the suggestions, the idea behind the billing is that if you share your Access point and lots of people use it, the service will be free - after all you're providing it! But I'll certainly try and keep it as simple as possible - the idea of a monthly cap is good.
brk
I see your angle, but how do you accurately measure the usage for billing? Since I'm running a private AP off my private home network, how do you know if the 10000GB of monthly traffic I've reported is an actual stat, or me manipulating the logs?

I think your idea has some merit, but it's more along the lines of "community project" and not "commercial ISP" (at least at first). Keep it simple and uncomplicated. Think of ways users could exploit things to their advantage (which will happen anytime there is financial incentive) and try to minimize those things.

spaetzel
Fon(http://fon.com) already does this. They sell low cost Routers that have a public Wifi network. Giving away your bandwidth gives you access on other people's networks.
contactdick
Sweet - I'll check it out. You might have saved me a couple of days coding :)
Swannie
Look into chillispot.info or worldspot.net. Built this sort of thing yourself with a spare PC or an up-datable router.
zck
Careful, this is probably against the terms of your contract with your ISP.
contactdick
I'll check it in detail but we're allowed to have our friends connect to our Wireless Access Point if they visit our house under our ToS, this idea just extends on that.

I'm in the UK though, possibly in other countries they are more restrictive about sharing your connection?

zck
This isn't an extension of that; you're reselling the connection. It might be a different story if you convinced everyone to open up their router, but you're selling access.