When colleagues from the US told us they could surf happily using their neighbors’ Wi-Fi connections, there was all-round skepticism. Wouldn’t the owner of the Wi-Fi connection get charged double? No, we were told, most broadband plans in the US operate on a flat rate (around $20 to $30 per month), and charges did not depend upon the amount of usage.
During a recent trip to Bangalore, I came across 12 hotspots during a 20-minute taxi ride from my hotel to my office – no wonder Bangalore is called the “Wi-Fi Hot Spot Capital of India” . I was able to latch on to around two of them from my notebook PC. After this, my skepticism about shareability of Wi-Fi connections vanished.
But, the next question that came up was, how does the Internet Service Provider permit this? After all, he is charging only one customer but multiple people are enjoying the connection.
After reading about FON, a new Spanish Wi-Fi aggregator startup, it appears that ISPs are looking the other way when people are sharing their Internet account.
FON is company advised by web maverick Niklas Zennstrom, the man behind Skype and Kazaa. Skype shook – and is still shaking – the telecom industry with free VoIP calls and Kazaa had earlier rattled the music industry with its music-sharing service. FON is leveraging the intrinsic openness and shareability of Wi-Fi by persuading people with home Wi-Fi connections to share access with fellow “foneros” within range. FON expects to aggregate one million Wi-Fi hot spots by the end of 2007.
This looks like user-generated internet access, as against the traditional telco-provided internet access.
How widespread can this coverage become?
Each hot spot provides coverage for around 50 feet. Assuming that they are spread out in the most widespread manner possible, FON’s network of one million hot spots will provide free Internet coverage for 50 million feet or 15,000 kms (9,375 miles). Considering that the earth’s circumference is around 40,000 kms (25,000 miles), this means we can expect up to 35% of the earth’s circumference to support free Internet coverage, just courtesy of FON.
As more FON-like providers set shop, we can expect to see free Internet access wrapping up the entire circumference of the earth many times over.
We are right now going through Web 2.0 typified by user-generated content. Are we beginning to see the first waves of Web 3.0 characterized by user-generated infrastructure?
UPDATE DATED 3 JULY 2020:
It’s nearly 15 years since the above blog post was published.
FON is around but I had to actually look it up to know that. Nobody around me has heard of it.
Web 3.0 / user-generated shared infra has not gone mainstream. On the other hand, dedicated infra – the opposite of shared infra – has gone mainstream and now covers almost 50% of the world’s seven billion population. Most of these are mobile Internet connections but landline / cable / satellite based broadband connections still exist.
UPDATE DATED 8 FEBRUARY 2022:
Helium is taking a shot at this, but with crypto token dynamics.
Given below are extracts from Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter dated 8 Feb 2022:
Helium is a decentralized wireless network for “internet of things” devices, powered by cryptocurrency. The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece and can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots, share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices — like parking meters, air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.
Anyone can use the Helium network, although most of its users so far are companies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters) and the Victor mousetrap company (which uses it for a new line of internet-connected traps). …
Helium, which was founded in 2013, didn’t start off as a crypto company. Its founders originally tried to build a long-range, peer-to-peer wireless network the old-fashioned way — by persuading people and businesses to set up hot spots and stringing them together. But they struggled to get enough participants, and the network stalled. …
So the company tore up its old business model and settled on a new one. Instead of building its network itself, Helium would make it fully decentralized and let users build it themselves by buying and connecting their own hot spots. Participants would be paid in crypto tokens, and they’d get to vote on proposed ideas for changes to the network. If the price of those tokens rose, they’d make even more money, and set up even more hot spots.
Ordinarily a network benefits from network effects, and you should join a network that a lot of people already use. But crypto networks benefit from “token effects,” and you should join a network that a lot of people will use in the future. It is plausible that, without the financial innovation of crypto tokenomics, the world would be under-provided with internet-connected mousetraps and scooters.
Also see New York Times article entitled Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All, the original article from which Money Stuff has quoted.