It's all about the law

This whole wifi thing is about a law that was passed, not from consumer complaints, but from ISP complaints. The major telcos want each and every person to purchase (a) an analog voice line, (b) a DSL data line and (c) a wireless data card and contract from THEM. If you "borrow" bandwidth from an open access point, especially one that was set up to knowingly share bandwidth, you are "robbing" the telco or cable carrier of their revenue that they "lost" when you "stole" bandwidth that is not yours under contract.

This behavior has been going on for over a decade. When I got my first high-speed internet connection 10 years ago, the contract EXPLICITLY prohibited me from connecting more than one computer to the line at a time. Indeed, the telco wouldn't even sell a stand-alone router: only a PCI card and funky-chicken software to use it that attempted to prevent routing. (It didn't work.) Now the telcos and cablecos allow you to connect more than one PC to their equipment, but implicitly it's only YOUR equipment, not some stranger's PC.

Consider this scenario (one I've been guilty of promoting on occasion): you have several neighbors that are within 100M of your house. They all have DSL, but the speeds are sucky and they are all paying US$60/mo for the privilege.

You discover that a commercial grade 8X8 SDSL link is only US$200/mo. If you broadcast 802.11g or better to your neighbors and have the commercial link, and you all "share" the cost...well, four or more it's cheaper than the DSL that they currently have.

But they're all guilty of theft, and you're guilty of RICO or something like that - because the telco explicitly prohibits the resale of that bandwidth.

I'm in a campground right now that has to use DirecWay to support their WiFi hotspot, because the local telco and cable companies WILL NOT SELL them a DSL line for shared use, unless the campground owner - and I swear, I couldn't make this up if I tried - PAYS the telco or cableco a monthly fee of around US$200 AND allows the telco or cableco to collect ALL revenue from the resale of the service to tenants in the campground! AND the campground owner has to BUY the equipment from the provider up front (at full retail), as well as pay for all the installation charges. Thank God DirecWay only charged US$2000 for the hardware and US$300/mo for the service, but lets him keep the resale revenue!

And, a final note: the Apple iPhone is specifically configured to take advantage of open WiFi at any opportunity to augment the EDGE connection for heavy data transfers. You do have to agree to connect, or explicitly set up the device to NOT try to connect to any open WiFi source, but the intent is clear: use a bit of shared bandwidth to grab a few files or mail and everyone is happy.

Is Apple guilty of selling burglary tools to the public? Or does AT&T figure this is a way to get back at all the cablecos that are beating it to on-demand programming?

'Nuff said. I'm going back into me shell...