[mesh] Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] Here comes the pain...

[Donovan Baarda]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 03:01:29PM +1000, Ryan Abbenhuys wrote:
> Personally, and I think there's probably others who feel the same way, I
> wouldn't want a wireless ISP 5km's away using me to jump to another node
> another 10km's away.  They're a business, making money, where I'm a
> hobbiest, who's invested a lot of money in a lot of nerdy equipment.  And
> unless they're prepared to pay me a few thousand dollars per anum I wouldn't
> want them using me for profit.

But what would you prefer, the buisness using your site as a hop, or the
buisness blasting through you with a high power signal to make the 10kms?

The buisness is probably going to prefer drowning you out to reach the 10kms
anyway, because then your little hobby node doesn't introduce another point
of failure for their link. It's going to take a _lot_ of convincing to get
buisnesses to trust hobby networks as part of a co-operative mesh.

Personally I think it would be great to have a co-operative mesh of
commercial and non-commercal nodes, and makes _much_ more sense than having
them all competing till the spectrum is blasted to uselessness.

I don't think widespread wireless access will ever happen without serious
co-operation and generousness from all parties involved. I don't think
commercial competition will ever make it work. Competing companies will
whack up hotspots all over the place, but end users subscribing to these
services will find them useless because of no continuity... as they roam
around they will move through multiple different provider's zones. Companies
will have little incentive to co-operate with each other to provide a
consistant service because co-operating with your competition is bad
buisness.

The only way widespread useful wireless will happen is if a single
utility/company/telco gets exclusive rights to do it _all_ (remember when
Telstra provided phones all over Australia?), or if there is a co-operative
non-commercial effort by all involved (remember how educational institutions
helped build the internet?).

-- 
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