Would you sign up for free WiFi?
 

Free advertiser-supported broadband via WiFi will be available in my neighborhood within two months. It's already active in other parts of the town.

They blanket entire towns with WiFi service. There are some cool spots where one would need a bridge to get better signal indoors. I drove over to the active area and did a bandwidth test and got about 500 Kbps - 700 Kbps.

They insert a banner ad at the top of the browser window.

Would you sign up for free ad-supported WiFi?

Depends on the size of the ad and how invasive the software is.

Currently, there is no software to download and they just put up the regular sized top-banner ads 168 x 60. It seems like this company realizes that the consumer is not going to be loyal and will not tolerate too much bullshit.

Would the WiFi be encrypted or just open for anyone to see?

My understand is that this would be a user choice. But the ISP would "see" all and with Google's text analysis capabilities, this would be a Big Brother situation. I am thinking that an ISP without Google's spy capabilites would be safer.

Is there a website where I can put in my credit card number and get as little as a day, month, subscription to the service, without ads and without restrictions?

Is it a service that has a crappy business model and will fail and take my access along with it?

Currently, they don't even ask for a CC #. The subscription is for just a session. It's so totally easy right now. One can oay $19.99 to opt out of the ads.

But, this company is hiring me to implement the Big Brother software that I am so concerned about.

So, The match is excellent; I have extensive experience in an area that they lack yet is critical to their business. The software engineers that I would work with are good guys and we had great discussions at the white board. I meet with top management tomorrow.

The most important thing to me is enjoying the job on a day-to-day basis. Part of that is not being micromanaged, but given responsibility for an entire area. The guy I would work for is more than happy to delegate responsiblity for this particular area to me.

Anyway, I think it is better if I implement the ad targetting software with my greater concern for user privacy.


Thru a twisty and winding path, I seemed to have found a good place for me to work. I'll be able to better evaluate the situation as tomorrow's meetings unfold.

Do they need a Philadelphia development office? I swear I could locate 10 developers in a month. They wouldn't all be qualified in the technologies needed but they'd all be smart enough to get to speed in weeks.

This new company lost the Philly contract to the evil combo of Earthlink/Google. I so distrust Google that is virually indescribable. This new company won Portland, OR and the second largest city in IL, Aurora.
They won Foster City, CA and downtown San Jose.

I love a company that wins out over Google. the new Evil Empire. "Do no evil", Google has already violoted their so-called principal many times over.

Okay...for the essentially clueless, like me...*how* do they keep an ad on your screen? Is it totally via a portal, no direct IP connection, or what?

@Els: When you connect to any ISP, your tranmissions go through their equipment. With this free WiFi service, part of their equipment is a server that simply pastes an extra banner ad HTML before the publisher's HTML you are viewing.

@UT: They want to keep all software development in one office. They only have 2 software engineers and I will be the 3rd.

Sounds like a good way to break some pages. Also sounds like a job for AdBlock.

Son of NetZero...

I'd hate to find a comercial service's WiFi signal at my house. I might have to demonstrate that I'm licenced for much more power in that band than they are...especially since they're not licenced for that band at all. Might involve some highly directional antennas.

@MaggieL: before I answer your objections/questions, let me say that they are astute/accurate observations.

Yes, it does sound that way. But, they explained to me how they are doing this and I am satified they will not likely break many web pages. I am a long time expert in both proxy servers and third-party ad insertion.

Yes, I tested AdBlock on them and it works easily. They said that they will watch the situation and deal with it only when it becomes more prevalent. Many ad companies I've spoken with have the same idea: it's still a very geeky thing to download an extension to FireFox. My thought is that all publishers and advertisers are eventually going to have to obfuscate URLs.

Yea, I asked the CEO about that today. I agree with him that NetZero was very unfocused and spent too much money (eg, SuperBowl Ads). This company doesn't even want to build a brand name to the consumer. They are seriously "lean and mean".

Interference is definitely a problem. But, I am confused. I didn't think *anyone* could be licensed for that band. Do they grant licenses for that band at all?

Anyway, sooner or later there will be a commercial WiFi signal blanketing your home. It is now inevitable. Just hope that it is not the GEvil Empire.

Big buck companies such as Verizon, Comcast, et al got a law passed in PA to make that illegal. Only Philadelphia is permitted because Philly had already started a city wide service. And since PA resident remained quiet (and vote religiously for their incumbants), then no such service is permitted in PA.

Well good luck RS, it sounds like a really fun venture, which is more than half the battle IMO!

No, it's not "inevitable"...currently WiFi (and wireless phone....and home weather station) use of S-band (2.4GHz) is under FCC Part 15 rules....meaning equipment must be type-accepted, stay below defined power levels, and accept interference from licenced users of the band. Like amateur radio operators.

Next time you say this is "inevitable", go talk to your "broadband over power lines" bretheren who want to put an RF signal on the power grid

I think "inevitable" would apply better to widespread expansion of EV-DO usage. But then that doesn't target people who don't have money to spend.

The BPL site lists WiFi mesh as an alternative. All these local goverments are granting contracts to build out WiFi mesh and no protesters are showing up.

Inevitable.

In Jeffersonville, PA a woman tied herself to a light pole screaming "FCC Part 15!" The truck operator carefully used the cherry picker to raise to the top of the pole to install WiFi equipment.

Tell that to the BPL guys in Manassas, VA.

And as I said...I don't have to climb a pole to express myself on this score. I just have to have the best signal on my own equipment...you can hang anything you like on the pole outside; if the neighbors can't use it because my licenced signal is swamping it, your Part 15 usage will have to "accept the interference".

You guys should be thinking about alternative transports; S-band WiFi isn't suitable for the "last mile"...it's more like the "last 250 meters". Meshing is all well and good until you hit local saturation, then it goes in the toity...and with ever-increasing bandwidth demands, that's not all that far away.

Maybe you should be considering the "broadband over gas lines" scheme. :-)

Of course, none of this matters if you've got enough VC money to keep you going to the IPO; then the music stops and everybody who can find a chair cashes out. Does your business plan tell you how many banner ads you have to sell to pay for and maintain an access point on every phone pole in town plus the associated backhaul?

As the site said, BPL is not WiFi mesh.

So you would mess up the signal simply because you can? I don't see what you would gain by screwing around with a ligitimate business. Show up at the Jeffersonville city council meeting and raise objections before it happens.

They put the boxes 1,000 feet apart. My high-up friend at Intel told me that this is commodity technology that's cheap enough to make these networks feasible.

I don't appreciate your mean spirited comments when you inject them. It's as if I called you a "dyke".

This is getting into information I can't say because of NDA. After going over these details with the CEO, I was satifisfied with required number of impressions and Effective CPM to make this profitable. It seems like a realistic plan.

Didn't say it was. Was pointing out something very similar that was "inevitable" until the rubber met the road. BPL at least claims to not be transmitting...although that's of course not true.

You sure you don't wanna take another look at that "broadband over gas lines" thing? They claim to be absolutely serious...
You seem to have forgotten who has the primary allocation...if I found your for-profit unlicenced Part 15 use was interefering with my use of a band I'm a primary user of, I might very well adjust my licenced useage to make your squatting unattractive. Part 15 is intended for small, low-power, very limited area usage. Hanging a max legal power box (or have you applied for authorization to use more power than the Part 15 limit?) on every telly pole in town is not that.
Wrong venue. Municipalities don't regulate band usage issues (fortunately).

Besides, we've already seen how easily bought-off they are when the last snake-oil gang came through wanting a franchise. (Hello, Comcast!) Currently they're whining about how the Big Bad Phone Company (whom they refer to in commercials I'm paying for them to deliver to my home as "The Phoneys") and complaining that they "should have to compete in the marketplace". No, I'm not kidding, a cable company (though their rather transparent astroturfers) actually said that. I guess the satellite providers taught them something.

And you can thank both them and the Phoneys both for buying off the politicians to grab your exclusive franchise before you could get to them. I live in Pennsylvania...
Well, we've all seen the Bubblehead act before...and I think that's much worse than "mean-spirited". If the Bubble V2.0 shoe fits your company, they should wear it. If not, then more power to them.

But not free bandwidth.

As for being a dyke, that's almost accurate. In fact I'm bisexual. But you can call me a dyke if you want; in your case I know it's just envy speaking. :-)
I didn't ask you what the numbers were, I asked if they were part of the plan. So I'll take than answer as a "yes". It's all extremely sensitive to the uptake rate, of course.

Thank you for conversing with me about this subject.

If it interferes with your licensed use, you have a legitimate gripe. It sounded as if you just wanted to be a radio terrorist just for fun.

No, part of their philosophy of following the path of least resistance.

They control their lampposts. One can not just mount equipment on public property at will. Metricom proved it's uneconomical to rent private property to do this. The good thing is that it is very unlikely you'll get multiple overlapping providers bathing your neighborhood. The major players are conceding the markets to the muni contract winner.

Then wouldn't you want Muni WiFi to teach them something about marketplaces as well? The home consumer would have many choices: cable, DSL, satelllite, WiFi.

Yea, I just learned about the Pennsylvania thing. Philly is taken, and one can't make money in Pittsburgh anyway ;).

You are accusing me of being a low integrity person just because I'm part of a Silicon Valley startup. I've resigned from two different companies that I determined had bad integrity. I've seen the Bubblehead act from a lot closer than you have and I can tell the difference between companies.

Well, you got me there sister. Actually, if I switched, I would rather be a glam girl with all the trappings of makeup, fancy hair and clothing.

What is most important is dividing up the ad inventory so that one can charge different rates based on the kind of web page the user is viewing. Eg, Run of Network might get $1 CPM, whereas PDA review pages might get $7 (actually from a real rate card).

One can reverse engineer demographics while maintaining user privacy through pages viewed combined with data from consumer services companies. You have a friend in the advertising business ;)

I don't care what they allow to be hung on the lampposts. But when it's hundreds of unattended boxes transmitting and encroaching on a licenced allocation, that's a problem, and outside municipal jurisdiction. There's already enough of a problem with the casual Part 15 users in this band...old-style cordless phones and household 802.11 use, for example.
All your other examples are licenced for the bandwidth they use. You guys want a free ride on the back of our primary allocation, just like BPL. You want to make a profit from raising the noise floor on 2.4 GHz.
Being at ground zero isn't morally superior to getting killed at the edge of the crater.
OK, so you're not transgendered, you're just a fetishist. Feel better? :-)
I'll decide who my friends are, thanks.

The national association for amateur radio, ARRL favors WiFi mesh:

... The broadband provider that's been testing BPL in the Village of Penn Yan, New York, ... DVI now is proposing to employ wireless mesh "WiFi" technology instead of BPL. ARRL CEO David Sumner, K1ZZ, congratulated Penn Yan Mayor Douglas G. Marchionda Jr and DVI for going with wireless broadband instead of BPL.

"Not only will your citizens receive better service, but a serious radio spectrum pollution problem has been averted as well," Sumner said ...

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2004/07/28/5/

They favor WiFi-mesh over BPL. BPL clobbers the entire HF spectrum at once, and ARRL is full of HF users. Ask AMSAT the same question.

That one's more "Please shoot my dog instead of my daughter."

I don't understand where this advocacy of Wi-Fi for wide area networks comes from. The industry has long since moved away from the so flawed BPL and other limited (insufficient) technologies to Wi-Max, Wi-Bro, and other possible solutions such as the upgrade to Motorola's Canopy. The current standard in development is 802.16

Meanwhile, for Wi-Fi (local networks), 802.11s involving mesh networks and wideband spread spectrum is also in development; 802.11n already approved as an upgrade to 802.11g.

I knew little about this stuff before recently. A director at Intel told me that the WiFi is the commodity that makes it economical. He had a project where the cost of any new poles were more than the WiFi boxes.

You could post useful info and/or links. But, you'd rather pistol whip me as much as you can.

.... If it's 802.11b or 802.11g, any channel other than 1 will probably be
all right, although the higher numbered channels are better. Channel 1
really raises the noise floor right in the middle of the AO-40
downlink, but 1-5 are all in the amateur allocation .. try and steer
them toward 6 or higher if possible. It may not be possible given the
requirements of their frequency coordination, but just make them aware
that 1-5 will cause us trouble in general and 1 is particularly
problematic ..

http://www.amsat.org/amsat/archive/a.../msg00123.html


I just emailed the company asking them if they could avoid the amateur allocation or not. In this country, it's innocent until proven guilty.

On the other side of the coin at AMSAT:

AMSAT News Service: Converged Satellite-WiFi Services Create New Revenue Opportunities http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/news/...5&y=2003&v=299

Poor you. You'll get over it.

I'm not here to do your research for you for free. The way I understand it, you're hoping to make a profit from a non-conforming use of Part 15 type-accepted equipment; expecting me to assist you is not very realistic. Don't you guys have RF engineers on staff?
(ANS is a real cut-and paste sheet sometimes-- I know, they wanted me to edit it at one point)

What the referenced (2003) SpaceDaily article is describing a press release for a company making WiFi hotspots with a satellite backhaul....the backhaul being in a legitimately licenced Earth-to-Space allocation outside the amateur bands. You want to use a mesh network in an already allocated band licenced to somebody else as the backhaul.

By the way, AMSAT isn't the only organization representing amateur radio users of the 2.4GHz allocation; I only cited it as an example.

As far as I know, not while still being in an 802.11 channel. The email you posted is discussing interference with a single downlink channel from the AO-40 satellite. Power companies trying to promote BPL have offered the excuse that they'll "notch out" any frequencies that cause interference. So far I'm not aware of any case in which that's been successful.

The WiFi mesh industry response seems to be along the lines of:
I read that as "We're lobbying to get the existing allocations confiscated and turned over to us". The nice thing about asking "How should...?" is that it completely bypassses asking "Should...?".

I know you don't listen very well so I'll say it again. I was simply in the midst of a job interview process and agreed to join them as an employee. Dwellars compare notes with each other in those situations.

I only inteviewed with the software engineers and the CEO. When I am actually on the job I'll be able to talk with the RF engineers in the lunch room.

This is getting ridiculous, go ahead and have the last word Maggs....

So you work for this company. I assume they plan to pay you.

There it is, the last word.

No, wait. I just posted and screwed it up.

Damnit!

In the list of solutions that include Wi-Max, Wi-Bro, and upgrade to Motorola's Canopy; CDMA also belongs on that list.

Given that one reason I use Firefox is for the Adblock extension which allows me to eradicate banner ads, I wouldn't touch this service.