Revolutionary?

"The Broadband Militia" by Michael Behar

But the battle over broadband raises the important question of whether bandwidth is a commodity. Small entrepreneurs think it is. After all, they reason, can a flour company demand a cut of the profits from cookies you sell at a bake sale just because you baked them with their flour? Absurd as this question might seem, the Free Wireless movement is forcing ISPs and telecom companies to define the exact legal limits of bandwidth allocation. That, in essence, is the problem with Free Wireless: It's at the mercy of the Baby Bells and cable companies, which, once the movement reaches critical mass, will crack down hard when they discover they're losing market share to a bunch of hackers.

In keeping with my notion that you should learn something new every day, here's my new thing. I had no idea. Having read this article, it just seems so bloody obvious.

The notion is that Someone buys a broadband connection to the Internet. That Someone sets up a WiFi (IEEE 802.11b networking standard) base station and, voila, anyone with the appropriate NIC can connect. An example of this on a large scale is NYC Wireless. Then there's Boingo Wireless, which touts the "largest commercial Wi-Fi network." They produce and distribute a free app that allows your computer to "sniff out" WiFi networks, thus tying you into an existing connection and you're off to the races.

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is this resell of band width. At home I used AT&T Broadband via a cable modem. I have no choice in my area for broadband access; there is no DSL service and a local, small ISP literally owns all the T-1 bandwidth in town. In any event I've got my ATTBI cable modem, wired to my DSL/cable router/switch, which ties together two desktop PC's. When I need to update things fast on my laptop, I hook it into my little LAN. I added a small hub I had lying around. All told, something like eight computers can tie into my single cable access. ATTBI "load balances" by restricting speed to 1.5mbs, and I don't think they give a hoot how many people are sucking on that 1.5meg pipe; it's all they'll give me.

For a friend I'll be setting up the same thing, only now, for not much more than I paid for my router/switch, the same device adds wireless access. We'll cable one PC/Linux box to the switch, but every other computer in the house will be wireless, including our laptops.

Now if he and I were still neighbors, I can easily see just adding a wireless access point to my existing setup and letting him tap into it. This would in all likelihood piss AT&T off, and that would appear to be what the "wireless militia" is doing.

So the question is why do existing broadband ISP's persist in avoiding wireless? Why are they are dedicated landlines and cables and wires?

Ah, control....