Best of the ISP-Lists

Freenets Are Theft

People running free Wi-Fi services are stealing from small businesses which cannot enforce the law—if they were stealing from cable companies, those same people would go to jail! Members of the ISP-Wireless list provide advice on preventing this crime.

[October 29, 2001]

On the ISP-Wireless list in October, ME queried,

"With free 'parasitic grid networks' being set up in a lot of cities, it would appear that it is no longer reasonable to presume that the average user's actual load on the network is way less than his available bandwidth. If I have one user offering access to his whole neighborhood, perhaps a different paradigm is in order. Any thoughts?"

A number of users expressed shock at the growing phenomenon:

[GY asked] "Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but are people buying bandwidth and then giving it to their friends free of charge? If it was cable TV, then you would be seeing people go to jail."

[BC agreed] "Exactly. I can think of four friends, all in their 50s, all principals in their businesses, who are thinking of doing that: giving away access. Aside from being tough on the DSL providers, this can make an abusive mess of the Internet."

[GY warned] "People are being conditioned to think Internet access should be free. That's a shame for us ISPs. All these deals for free Internet do nothing more than degrade our marketplace, while some big company figures out that it's not profitable to do so."

Others offered recommendations on how to block such usage:

[JT advised] "Make it clear how many PCs you are connecting. If they go over that number, raise the rate, and if they don't pay, cut the feed."

[TS countered] "NAT makes it easy to hide the number of PCs connected. Instead, we just have a bandwidth cap: after x bytes of data transfer, they have to pay for the next block. It's clearly spelled out in our user agreement. Never have had to collect extra bandwidth charges, but had several offenders immediately drop their consumption when the warning went out that they were approaching extra charges."

[AM agreed] "Establish transfer limits, and charge per MB or GB over the allotted amount. I wonder if RBOCs and cable operators will ever get a clue and charge per packet? Right now, on their network, someone could suck down $1000+ worth of bandwidth for $39! Clearly those are the types of providers that these parasitic grid networks operate off of: providers who offer unlimited broadband for under $50."

KM suggested that there's a great way to take advantage of this kind of consumer interest:

"I think a provider could work this model successfully if they can sell the equipment and bandwidth to the management of a public place of gathering, make some money off of it, and establish an electronic community.

We're looking at selling public-access Access Points (APs) and bandwidth to businesses such as restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, etc. MobileStar and Wayport are doing the same thing, but on a national level.

Our model is to sell the equipment and bandwidth to the business; then they can, in turn, give it away to the end user, or resell it and allow us to maintain the billing infrastructure for an additional cost. They can also require end users to bring their own 802.11b-compatible gear, lease radios they purchased from us, or sell the radios onsite to the end users." .

—End