AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Use Wi-Fi to Resell Broadband, Legally!
SpeakEasy.Net a broadband provider has setup a new program called NetShare. This program allows you to sell wireless internet access to your neighbors using your broadband connection as the backbone.
Once you signup for the program all you have to do is connect a 802.11 wireless router to your broadband. Find people within the routers range to signup for net access and you're set. Speakeasy provides the people with the basic services like email and handles all the billing. You just give them the net access and get a nice credit on your bill.
Well not completely. Of course you do have to provide basic help for setting up wireless cards in clients machines and configuring them if they can't do it themselves. Plus deal with network issues and listen to them complain when something goes wrong. But hey that's part of life! This is probably the greatest deal I've seen yet. While most broadband providers are enforcing no sharing policies speakeasy figured out it'd actually would benefit to let customers share. Best of all by doing it this way they were making sure to get a cut of the money.
I really hope more broadband providers realize this is a good thing and implement it. This is the kind of thinking that will help to expand high speed access to the masses. It will start out with people just sharing net access to neighbors, but I'm sure there are people out there right now figuring out how to use it to distribute Wi-Fi to whole towns.
If I lived where speakeasy was available I know I'd have signed up already. Just getting enough neighbors in the same apartment building to sign up to cover your bill would be great. You could upgrade to the fastest package offered and not even have to worry about how to afford it. Life would be good!
on 07/09/2003 at 08:01 PM