On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 02:02:46PM +1000, Amos Shapira wrote: > > As far as I remember, the first time I heard about the option for meshed > ISP's it was a for-profit organisation allowing clients to ramp up credits > for their own use by allowing others to make use of their own uplink via > WiFi.
I was involved with a start-up ISP that was to provide free access via WiFi. The money for basic access and infrastructure was to come from advertising. This was in 2004 before Google took over advertising, WiFi was common and so on. The startup had a business plan and a prospective investor, some interesting locater technology, and some interesting advertising technology. You could buy credits for advanced services, better access, printing from kiosks and so on. There was a plan to go forward with a targeted advertising handheld device similar in concept to the holograms in "Minority Report", but implimented in 2005 or so. Then the City of Jerusalem announced free, city wide WiFi supported by the taxpayers (Intel was to provide the WiFi hardware for free) and the investor disapeared. Google announced their "Free WiFi Zones" starting with San Francisco, and it became impossible to get money to compete. Since then the Jerusalem City Council refused to fund the network beyond it's original size, few others have come forward to pay for it, and private WiFi networks proliferated because customers would walk out when they found the free WiFi they expected was not there. Google was never able to implement a single WiFi access point in San Francisco, I think the local telcos blocked them. Several other cities have either built small public WiFi networks and since stopped them, or never got beyond the planing stage. The startup you are reffering to AFAIK is FON from Spain, which allows you to get credit by sharing your Internet connection. You need a special router to join. BT included their software in all of their new routers but so far, no one really uses it. People just don't want to share their Internet connection with strangers and no one wants to pay to get home WiFi access. I don't know about elsewhere but many of my friends in the U.S. and here are so burried in unsecured WiFi networks that they have trouble accessing their own. In a large city it's almost impossible NOT to find a "free" network. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
