[Rooftops] Boston Globe: Hotspots, Cold Feet

[Lars Aronsson]

On June 30, Jim Youll wrote:
> 'Hotspots,' cold feet
> Some analysts wonder whether WiFi craze is a bubble waiting to burst
> By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 6/30/2003
>
> [...] Some 4,500 WiFi hotspots -- areas of up to 300 feet in radius
> within which subscribers with laptop and handheld computers can get
> broadband-speed Net service -- have been deployed across the United
> States, mainly in the last two years, according to Pyramid Research

I think you can find 4500 such spots in Boston alone, where DSL
subscribers have forgot to protect their residential Wi-Fi networks
from people who walk or drive by.  Our problem is that we don't "see"
those locations as hotspots.  Not yet.  We need to open our eyes to
this fact.

Some percentage of those spots are connected to Verizon DSL and what
if other Verizon DSL subscribers could use them all?  That could make
"membership in the Verizon DSL club" attractive, the sort of lock-in
that residential broadband operators have been looking for under every
stone from video-on-demand to web portals.  Nobody wants to provide
the raw pipe, the IP bandwidth that can be provided cheaper by any
competitor.  In order to create the lock-in, outsiders also need to be
locked out.  The broadband operator needs a central gateway that can
authenticate new users and identify them as paying subscribers,
whether they are in their own home or roaming around, whether they use
ethernet or wireless ethernet.

Commercial stand-alone Wi-Fi, Starbucks style, is failing because the
demand is too low and costs are not.  Whether the demand for
"membership" in a DSL operator's wireless cloud is strong enough,
remains to be seen.  The scenario is technically feasible, costs very
little to implement, and an old telephone monopoly which now provides
DSL (such as Verizon) is best suited to do it.

One way to implement this scenario could be to make an integrated
Wi-Fi/wired hub and DSL modem that *doesn't* run NAT, but forwards
every DHCP request down to the operator's central gateway (which might
run NAT, although many of us hate NAT).  Does anybody know what sort
of equipment Verizon installs in the pay phones on Manhattan?



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Free Wireless Networking - http://elektrosmog.nu/