Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Sil Greene <Sil_greene AT unc.edu>]

Reported 04.03.04 19:15 from Scott:

.:As found at http://www.linspot.com/
.:
.:> LinSpot is free and simple software to sell your Wireless Internet 
.:> Access. LinSpot uses an innovative combination of different 
.:> technologies to turn your Wireless Internet into a paid-for Internet 
.:> Access Point and let YOU benefit from it!
.:>
.:> With this C2C (consumer-to-consumer) technology we want to turn all 
.:> individual Wireless Internets into one big network, delivering 
.:> Internet Access anywhere. If you want to make some money with your 
.:> AirPort or any other WiFi router, LinSpot is for you!
.:
.:I wonder just how much money these guys will bring in from this 
.:venture. Personally, I would rather give away my bandwidth than sell it 
.:and would hope to find others doing the same should I have a need to 
.:get online.

For themselves, or for the AP owners?  Personally, I like the idea, but 
it's not an easy thing to implement.  As for money to be made, if you're 
the only AP in a high-traffic area (or in the apartment complex) a modest 
amount might be a reasonable expectation; if all your neighbors have their 
own, you won't make much.  But I'm expecting not micro-payments, but nano- 
or pico- payments, based on bandwidth usage; even micro- is too expensive.

I've envisioned many variants of this theme, mostly for an environment of 
scattered houses, say in the mountains.  Give each house an AP, and a 
line-of-sight link to each neighboring house it can see, and you have an 
interesting mesh potential along any given stretch of road.  You can fill 
in the gaps on power poles.  A line-of-sight link gives you the bandwidth 
for ad-hoc VoIP or videophone, and if each house provides its own email 
server, you have the potential to chain them so that no other network 
connection is necessary.  (Well, the mesh would require one, and benefit 
from more, internet gateways, but there are ways of handling that.)

My personal goal is wi-fi access from any arbitrary point on the 
Blue Ridge Parkway.  It's a nice dream for the moment.  

--Sil

-- 
"If you put your supper dish to your ears you can hear the sounds
 of a restaurant."  --Snoopy    (Charles Schultz 02-12-2000 RIP)
Sil_Greene AT unc.edu