Helping Sir Tim bring the internet to all – donating some bandwidth to humanity
I have been thinking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s recent call for broadband for all and coming up with ideas that may help. A good article that has more details can be found at the following link.
I came up with the following. As we move to faster and faster broadband, how about creating routers that have two wireless connections. One would be for my use as usual. The second would be a bandwidth limited connection for the public to use. If the second connection were standard across all the routers, then users could roam as they travelled, much like mobile phones.
I wouldn’t mind giving up some bandwidth for the betterment of humanity. I’m not sure that a link at my home would get much use from anyone other than digitally connected sheep in the field out back. A link at my office would though – based in central london. Very few people are in our office at the time of night I am writing this so if the link could somehow grow and shrink according to time / usage, so much the better.
I guess some people would abuse the free access. There are quite a few people who use the roads in a way that annoys me – doesn’t mean I plan to stop paying for them.
Interested to get people’s views.
I’m with you on this – I suggested something similar once as a great corporate PR exercise; there are routers built by Cisco for petrochems plants which can throw a signal over a wide area so it’s easy enough to do.
However, given the wide use of things like Skype, it’s easy to see why telecoms companies would be less than enthusiastic about access such as you describe – effectively free at the point of use.
I know of at least one entrepeneur who got into hot water by effectively reselling his own spare bandwidth…not sure what the legalities of giving it away are.
It’s a shame public sector WiMax never really became widespread.
Tim Sharpe
January 21, 2011 at 11:56 am