Data Plans…

From Gruber: Rogers Announces iPhone Rates in CanadaAnd — surprise, surprise — they suck. Stingy data limits and no unlimited data plan at any price. Rogers is being stupid here, but not for the reasons that you may think. Though I’ve had an Unlimited data plan for nearly a year, the thing that it brings … Continue reading “Data Plans…”

From Gruber:

Rogers Announces iPhone Rates in Canada
And — surprise, surprise — they suck. Stingy data limits and no unlimited data plan at any price.

Rogers is being stupid here, but not for the reasons that you may think.

Though I’ve had an Unlimited data plan for nearly a year, the thing that it brings is not peace of mind due to knowing I can download as much as I like, but peace of mind regarding not having to account for it. I don’t want itemised data. Rogers offers 4 data plans – 400 MB, 750 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB. Some people might think these are low but consider this…

I’ve had my iPhone since October 2007 – eight months – and anyone who knows me would know that I’d be a heavy user of my iPhone. I may have Wifi 90% of the time at weekends but only for maybe 40% of the time during the week. And I’ve only managed to use a gigabyte. So chill out. I mean, think about how long you’d have to have your iPhone downloading in order to get a gigabyte of data (presumably this is going to be quicker under 3G – rumours say speeds will be 1.4 Mbps)

Caps will also deter tethering – using your phone as a modem for your desktop computer – which isn’t really an issue on the iPhone anyway (and we’re pretty assured Apple will block any apps which enable it). They’ll deter using a bittorrent client. They’ll deter any sort of persistent data flow – which is probably a good thing.

Just as O2 is providing free access to all Cloud and BTOpenZone Wifi hotspots, all of the Canadian packages include unlimited access to Rogers and Fido Wi-Fi hotspots. Use them!

Now if Apple could do something about the cost of roaming…

WiFi sandbox

Via YourTechStuff Here’s a development that seems to hark back to the bad old days worst of the current wi-fi overcharging. The Dublin Dockland Development Authority has been telling the media for the last two years that it would be rolling out “free” wi-fi. Now it has done so — and limited it to 10 … Continue reading “WiFi sandbox”

Via YourTechStuff

Here’s a development that seems to hark back to the bad old days worst of the current wi-fi overcharging. The Dublin Dockland Development Authority has been telling the media for the last two years that it would be rolling out “free” wi-fi. Now it has done so — and limited it to 10 commercial websites.

  • www.dublindocklands.ie
  • www.sports.ie
  • www.welfare.ie
  • www.met.ie
  • www.chq.ie
  • www.ifsc.ie
  • www.dublinbus.ie
  • www.itsyourmoney.ie
  • www.dubsimon.ie
  • www.phantom.ie

Users accessing websites outside the ten free sites will be charged at rates starting at €6 for one hour.

This bears a lot of resemblance to my Internet Everywhere model except for two important details.

  1. It’s very expensive – you can buy it by the week for €60 but that’s horrendously expensive for what will be a grazing service. They can’t expect people to sit on it for hours and even if they did, it shouldn’t be more expensive than sitting at home on your own broadband when you consider the potential contention ratios!
  2. It’s limited to one outbound carrier – I didn’t expect this anyway as it involves a bit more vision. It would also require the buy in of several carriers which would, due to the market, drive prices down. Again, consider the contention here if people actually used it.

The idea of having half a dozen sandboxed commercial sites is enticing anyway. Apart from the fact that free is always good, these companies are advertising, they’re paying for the network. They’ll be visible on the captive portals you use to get out.

Think about it – you need sports results? Or the news? Public transport details? The weather? All of this should be free. And I see no problem with paying for internet access.

Inside your sandbox, you’ll want to host as much content as you can to keep people in the sandbox and only use the wide-area-network provided by the carriers as infrequently as possible. This means perhaps building a series of community forum sites, offering services to the local community so that they come to you first and essentially providing eyeballs for these advertisers.

The cost is where the Dublin Docklands WiFi sandbox most probably fails. They have obviously syndicated content from 10 commercial sites but is that going to be enough when combined with the onerous penalties for daring to look at something off-network!

As a model it’s right on the cusp of being correct as long as they reduce the price and as long as the content from the 10 sites they permit isn’t crap.

Workplaces

I’ve never made secret my love of the concepts of ‘Going Bedouin’ or ‘Co-Working’. The difference between them is simple. Going Bedouin The principle of having your entire business on your back. Today you work in a coffee shop on Royal Avenue, tomorrow a coffee shop in Bradbury Place. And with 3G USB doohickeys being … Continue reading “Workplaces”

I’ve never made secret my love of the concepts of ‘Going Bedouin’ or ‘Co-Working’.

The difference between them is simple.

Going Bedouin

The principle of having your entire business on your back. Today you work in a coffee shop on Royal Avenue, tomorrow a coffee shop in Bradbury Place. And with 3G USB doohickeys being so cheap these days it seems that you don’t even need to find a WiFi-enabled cafe. Going Bedouin is going to be best for someone who has a relatively paper-free business due to the lack of printing facilities and they’d also be likely to stock up on extra batteries just in case their workplace of the day doesn’t have any convenient power points. Your expenses are going to be the amount of food and beverages that the coffee shop owner will expect you to buy in order to retain your seat. Some Bedouin workers have scorned the idea of ‘paying your way’ but it is an important part of the economy. If you don’t like it, shack up in a corner of the bus station or in another public space.

Co-Working

For the most part, this is about hiring a desk in a shared space. This is different to hiring a serviced office and sitting hidden in there knowing that the guy in the next office is working on something different. Shared spaces are all about getting the benefits of being in a busy office with less of the negatives. Candidates for co-working tend to be social people, people not irritated by the presence of others and people who might have worked for a big company before and missed the interaction at the water cooler or the photocopier when they went independent. Most co-workers will only use the shared space part-time due to other pressures in their lives. The Co-Work space should therefore be something of a refuge and it’s not conducive to have stressed-out, under-pressure individuals in your space (unless watching someone slowly implode really relaxes you). Co-Working is about relationships more than anything.

Excellence in workspace

An important point in changing your workstyle to add in Bedouin working or Co-Working is to make sure it provides an improvement.

The space you choose should fit in with the pattern of how you want to work. If you like working early in the morning or late at night, you’ll need to consider this (most half decent cafes in Belfast seem to close at 6). Consider your transport routes and, more importantly, your footwear. Consider that you may need to bring a coat of some sort even when the weather seems fine (and a warm sweater if you’re in Ireland).

For a Co-Working space, look at the other co-workers and make an attempt to be friends with them. Is the space tidy or well-kept? Do they have insurance? Or Alarm systems? What’s to stop someone walking in off the street? Do you feel comfortable leaving your equipment and content unattended? Do they have a lockup for your stuff when you’re out of the office? What ‘virtual office’ facilities do they have? Fax? Telephone? Receptionist? Do they have a kitchen? What about a breakout area for chat? Do the other co-workers have any odious habits? Does it smell fresh? Are the windows open? Is the carpet clean?

And when it’s restroom time – do you pack up your mobile office into your bag and disappear into the restroom to emerge later smelling faintly of cheap liquid soap? Do you leave it all out and hope that someone will look after your stuff?

Co-Working is all about relationships – do you trust these people?

Prerequisites

The first and most important element in considering Bedouin or CoWorking plans is whether or not you can make money – some businesses lend themselves naturally, while some do not. Services like Twitter give you a skewed perspective of work because there’s little visibility of time zones, business models and segregation. While you’re making your decisions, you can see that some people are re-installing their gaming machines or going for a walk, sitting in a coffee house drinking Americanos, giving talks or drumming in the park. You don’t see the work that they do because you’re always being updated by someone.

Another element that people don’t consider is outsourcing work that doesn’t bring direct value. Hire an accountant. Make sure your mail host and file server host are reliable. Make sure you have a reliable communications network with others in your team (if you are part of a team) because your team will need that interaction with you.

Ask yourself why you want to change your workstyle. Coffee is cheaper at home. Peace and quiet probably more achievable (unless there are kids involved). Talk through it with your partner at home as they may resent you changing from being a teleworker-at-home to a teleworker-in-cafe.

If you’re doing it, embrace it. Make the most of it and don’t be a wallflower.

Next Steps

I plan to talk more about possibilities in Co-Working over the next few days. I don’t know how much of my vision concurs with the vision of the individuals who make up the Co-Working Belfast group because I have some very specific ideas of what I want to see. I still have this business plan for ‘the new workspace’ which I wrote in 2006 and I think it deserves another crack of the whip.

BarCamp WiFi Disaster

Okay, this one left me scratching my head. When I arrived at BarCamp, we were allocated two IP addresses on the QUB network and I set about using one of them to provide a public network and the other to provide a Private network for the Webcasts or whatever and to act as a failover. … Continue reading “BarCamp WiFi Disaster”

Okay, this one left me scratching my head.

When I arrived at BarCamp, we were allocated two IP addresses on the QUB network and I set about using one of them to provide a public network and the other to provide a Private network for the Webcasts or whatever and to act as a failover. Things were fine at first until people started to arrive. We might have had ten to fifteen laptops on the network when the WiFi just started playing up.

Using iStumbler, we determined that there was some sort of issue with the network. WiFi channels 1, 6 and 13 were stuffed with ambient traffic so we repositioned to avoid those and still we were getting this problem. In our WiFi network scans we were seeing multiple instances of our networks, though the second one was encrypted. Attempts to join our unencrypted networks would fail silently and the only stable network we could manage was the Ad-hoc one provided by my Macbook Pro – which not everyone could join (the Nokia N800s and Vista laptops mainly).

The theory went:

There was some sort of Trojan effect going on, either automatically or malevolently (and presumably from an attendee). When you put up a network, it would spawn a copy of the network which had a WiFi password. This would cause your attempts to join our network to fail – it was like it was jammed. If you put up an encrypted network, then you had a 50% chance of latching onto the wrong network and entering your WiFi password. This would make WiFi password harvesting to be very quick. They theory continued that the malevolent presence would then join your encrypted network using the harvested password details and start to sniff for passwords on the WiFi.

Bastard, eh?

I would really hate to think this was an attendee acting malevolently but then I’ve seen worse from humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a trojan on someone’s machine because someone definitely had an unpatched Windows machine on the network, the “Free Public Wifi” ad-hoc network that appears nearly everywhere there’s a collection of Windows machines.

See

The puzzling phenomenon of seeing “Free Public Wi-Fi” that you can’t connect to when you’re searching for free public wi-fi has been solved. It’s “Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement.”
From a Nomad Research Centre Advisory:
This advisory documents an anomaly involving Microsoft’s Wireless Network Connection. If a laptop connects to an ad-hoc network it can later start beaconing the ad-hoc network’s SSID as its own ad-hoc network without the laptop owner’s knowledge. This can allow an attacker to attach to the laptop as a prelude to further attack.

Not recent and not unpatched. But there it was.

This post explains something else:

At Emerging Tech 4-5 years ago, someone had set up an ad hoc network with the same name as the real one. It was interfering with the real one, so the organizers repeatedly asked whoever had set up the ad hoc network to shut it down. The culprit turned out to be …. me. But I knew that I had not set up an ad hoc network, much less set one up and name it the same as the conference network. All I did was open my laptop and click on one of the ones that had the official conference name … which must have been an ad hoc network someone else set up. I then became the “carrier.” Ack.

That’s just brilliant. So it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t malevolent and wasn’t a clever Trojan/Worm but rather was just the way Windows works.

If this is the case, an extra special thanks to everyone who uses an unpatched version of Windows. I loved missing talks because I was troubleshooting why the WiFi was screwy.

BarCamp Belfast 08 mini review

Things that interested me most… Emma Persky’s Feature Recognition. Although challenged by being opposite Brian O’Neill’s freelancer talk (and let’s face it, what geek doesn’t dream of sticking it to the man and going ronin!). Best idea – move it to another time slot and that really worked I think. I thoroughly enjoyed it and … Continue reading “BarCamp Belfast 08 mini review”

Things that interested me most…

Emma Persky’s Feature Recognition. Although challenged by being opposite Brian O’Neill’s freelancer talk (and let’s face it, what geek doesn’t dream of sticking it to the man and going ronin!). Best idea – move it to another time slot and that really worked I think. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it gave me ideas for five, six, seven more applications that I don’t have the skill (yet) or the resources to build (again, yet). The possibilities with pattern recognition are fascinating and though this technology has been studied for a while, it takes a good demo to move it from ‘yeah, sure’ to ‘oh, that’s cool’. Good job Emma!

Tracy Dempseys Life Wheel/Spokes demo – I’d not really thought about my priorities that way. I have therefore resolved to work on the areas most deficient (quality time with my kids, general day to day job satisfaction) and not worry about the areas I’m happy with (how current I am with technology etc, money). The interesting thing is not thinking about how much effort you put into these things but how happy you are with the results. For those areas where I want more – I’m going to work on them with the theory that you get out what you put in. It’s funny, I’ve been results oriented (and passionate and loudmouthed about achieving them) for years in my ‘professional’ life.

Gerard McBreen’s Digital Circle. I wasn’t interested in the Adobe FLEX/AIR stuff anywhere near as much but Digital Circle is like a taster-for-10 of some ideas I’ve had for years (and the reason I tried to start Infurious). I’d still like Infurious to be a ‘publisher’ for a small group of developers but don’t know how to approach it just yet. I need to think on that but would encourage anyone creating any sort of digital content (software, eBook, movies, animations) to join Digital Circle.

And the rest?
All of the others were good though not especially relevant to me (Ruby scales? Whoodathunkit?) and next time round I’d like to hear Richard’s presentation on webcasting. Nick’s talk on the New Music Economy was an alternative path to my promotion of ‘1000 fans’ but as he said on the day – there isn’t just ‘one way’. As an homage to the existing model of music economy, I bought ‘Feel Good Lost’, by Broken Social Scene last night from iTunes after a short listen to a track during BarCamp. I’ve not bought much new music recently so that was nice.

Best Bits– conversations in the corridors and between talks – finding out how people got into their line of work, why they made their choices and also discovering some pleasant feedback on things I’ve done (or could be about to release). I do need to talk to Will King about his OpenGeo data but that can wait for a little bit. Mix that in with a little WiMax and you’ve got a spicy meatball!

Worst Bitsthe WiFi disaster. Something was definitely rotten in Kislev. I’m blogging about this concurrently but it flummoxed me and Paul Dundas and in the end to supply two rooms with intermittent WiFi, we ended up having to use three infrastructure access points and one ad-hoc access point. The latter was my laptop which effectively kept me from vegging out and using it which was probably a good thing.

Next steps?

OCC BBQ is on the 16th July down in Terryglass, County Tipperary (about 200 miles away from where I’m sitting as I type this). I’m driving down and will be sorting out some accommodation in the next day or so. Current thinking is to trip down on Tuesday afternoon (arriving before closing time at the pub), enjoy the BBQ throughout the Wednesday and then trip back on the Friday. That would mean two nights accommodation though.

I also want to continue that chat with Andy McMillan, Andrew Gribben and Matt Keenan about Co-working that we started right at the end when I was packing up. David Rice should also be involved but only if he can find a ‘first name twin’ like the rest of us. I’m joking, David. Mostly.

There was also some talk of doing another ‘event’ in six months? Maybe a TechLudd? (Go on, call it TechNorn or something). I’m up for helping get this going – I’d wanted to start an ‘Expo’ for tech companies for years!

Fabulous stuff today. My only regret was that I didn’t talk! I’m going to remedy that at OCC BBQ by the way as well as talking to some interesting people I’ve wanted to chat with for ages.

OCC BBQ, Terryglass, Tipp – 16th July

The motion was made for one party to attend the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ being held in Terryglass, in Tipperary on the 16th July 2008. Surprisingly, the other party did not wince or shout or laugh but immediately began assisting with preparations for the trip. Preparations are underway. Which is pretty much how it went down when … Continue reading “OCC BBQ, Terryglass, Tipp – 16th July”

The motion was made for one party to attend the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ being held in Terryglass, in Tipperary on the 16th July 2008. Surprisingly, the other party did not wince or shout or laugh but immediately began assisting with preparations for the trip. Preparations are underway.

Which is pretty much how it went down when I asked HerIndoors about going to it. So I’m a little gobsmacked.

The event starts at 11 am which means probably driving down the night before(Tuesday), staying over and then attending the day (Wednesday), crawling back to the accommodation for a second night and then driving back next morning (Thursday) – though as a non-drinker I have entertained the idea of driving back after the BBQ ends.

That’s a long drive but I’ll have my TomTom and my wits.

Internet everywhere…

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert! This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved … Continue reading “Internet everywhere…”

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert!

This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved in – business/ecommerce, playing games, talking/tweeting – the network should support it by:

  1. being present (this is a biggie and probably a first step)
  2. being affordable (it shouldn’t be an arm and a leg more expensive than anything else. I’m looking at you BTOpenZone)
  3. being available (meaning no time restrictions, multiple routes off the network to the internet)

A few years, Andrew Gallagher and I had a meeting or two with other like-minded individuals and started a little offshoot of the Belfast GNU/Linux User Group which Andrew named ‘cumulus wireless’. Some of the guys reported their line-of-sight to others houses but the things that excited me were ‘cantennas’ and setting up a 802.11b wireless signal over a mile down near the Odyssey in Belfast using two iBooks with their airport cards attached to an omni and a backfire antenna.

Again, I can’t speak for Andrew or the rest but my vision was to create a mesh around Belfast which anyone could tap into. This ‘private’ network would be open to use/abuse by anyone and would provide

  • medium – just simple IP and name resolution and routing, it would be a signal that anyone could join and using zeroconf (or by swapping IP addresses over more conventional means), they could set up any IP connection – be that video, voice, chat, sending files. As long as the data stayed on the network, there would be no charge.
  • portal – an advertising supported captive portal that would require sign-in every time you wanted to access a service outside the network. This portal would be common and would be there entirely to provide admin contact, acknowledgement of contributors, a small amount of revenue and lastly….
  • access – I had hoped to convince ISPs locally to sign up to it and provide access to their internet pipes. By getting their access in there, they would pay to support the maintenance and growth of the network. In return, they would charge access to their internet pipe directly to the consumer using credit card, premium SMS, micropayments or whatever they liked. This would mean the market would level itself. If an ISP wanted to offer a basic pipe to keep costs down, then they could. If an ISP wanted to offer a high speed pipe for premium customers who absolutely needed multi-megabyte speeds then, again, they could. It seemed like a pretty good business model.

To put this in perspective, this was in October 2002.

But as things happen, when this was started I was working for Nortel – I’d got the experience in building resilient networks (using wires mostly as Nortel was still mixed about their wireless strategy). Two months later I was an employee of a Mac repair startup which failed spectacularly in May 2003. By June 2003 I was running my own business and didn’t have time for pie in the sky projects like this.

That said, six years later, it’s still not a bad business model.

Today, I read a post from the NotAnMBA blog:

I am writing this post from my laptop, on a bus, in a tunnel.

More specifically, I’m writing this post from my laptop on BoltBus, a bus service which offers free wi-fi and travels between several of the larger cities in the Northeast, all for about $12 each way, while traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel.

EVDO and similar cell-driven services have been bringing the Internet to unexpected places for a while now, but at a decently-expensive price. Internet on a $12 bus from New York to Philly is another story.

If you can do your job on the Internet, then you can do your job in a lot of places. Now you can do your job on a bus.

and it gets me thinking about what could still be possible with time ( a lot of time ), money (a middling amount of money) and goodwill (a huge amount). Am I a dreamer? Is municipal WiFi still a bit of a pipe dream in the luddite metropolis of Belfast (Yes).

Would I like a WiFi supported bus or train service? I’d definitely skip taking the car if I thought that I could get decent service and a table on the train.

Cell service in the US

Macworld.com has a great FAQ on the 3G iPhone. The thing I’m most interested in is this graphic: Look at the white areas. That’s where there is no cell service available. In 2008. Related posts: In a word, innovation Unravelling the Mystery of Good Customer Service Principles of Public Service A&E in NI: a problem … Continue reading “Cell service in the US”

Macworld.com has a great FAQ on the 3G iPhone. The thing I’m most interested in is this graphic:

Look at the white areas. That’s where there is no cell service available. In 2008.

HSDPA coverage in NI

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide. The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The … Continue reading “HSDPA coverage in NI”

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide.

The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The current EDGE-based iPhone can do one or the other; that is you can’t start browsing the web on your phone while you’re using it for a telephone call. Yes, this is a real need!

What does this mean for speeds? Rumour has it that O2’s implementation has a theoretical peak of 3.6 Mbps (about 400 kilobytes per second) but their mobilebroadband USB modem package, which also uses HSDPA, tops out at 1.8 Mbps. That’s not quite as impressive but then again, beats the pants off EDGE. O2 also specifically prohibit streaming and VoIP applications over their 3G network.

O2’s roaming charges for data aren’t too bad these days. For countries in Europe it’s £3 per megabyte and outside of that, £6 per megabyte. Considering that since October 2007 I’ve consumed less than 1 gigabyte of data, I’m not worried about the additional charges for roaming while I’m on holiday for two weeks in August.

I’m going to pop into an O2 store later this week – have a go at their 3G demo machine and ask some questions. Last time I tried a 3G demo machine was in the Three (3) shop in Castlecourt and my iPhone beat Windows on 3G for rendering a web site – so you can imagine how slow the 3G was. Not very impressive. Now…O2’s infrastructure provides Three (3)’s 2G network and a little birdie told me that Orange provide the backbone for their 3G network so the 3G performance I noted may not be indicative.

If you’re in Belfast, say, around QUB, you’re going to do okay.

but coverage gets very patchy outside of the town centre in Bangor (where I live). In fact, my house is right in the middle of one of the big white areas there so I’m going to have to rely on WiFi or (god forbid) dialling down to EDGE or GPRS.

and where my parents live in Lisburn is just … barren. For what it’s worth, they live about 200 metres away from that green B101 label in the centre of the map. It doesn’t look like they’re going to be enjoying HSDPA speeds any time soon!

and I’m thankful that Mac-Sys Ltd will give you their WiFi password if you ask them nicely because coverage in Newtownabbey really depends. As soon as you start seeing grass, the coverage simply ends.

The saving grace is that O2’s mobile broadband contract also covers the Cloud hotspots (which there are quite a few of these days) and the iPhone contract will also cover BT OpenZone hotspots from July 11th (give or take a few days). Pretty soon, we’ll have wireless everywhere.

So, go on, pop along to O2’s network maps for HSDPA and post your area coverage. Drop me a link or a pingback so we can see what’s happening!

Muni-WiFi revisited

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi: The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both. The lack of understanding of … Continue reading “Muni-WiFi revisited”

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi:

The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both.
The lack of understanding of the technology quite often lead to the network either using not enough wireless nodes resulting in bad coverage, low throughput, high latency and other performance problems or to too many wireless nodes causing signal interference, “node hopping” etc. also resulting on performance problems. All this results in a dissatisfied user which in turn leads to bad publicity, falling revenue and investors losing confidence.
Lousy business models more often than not contained unrealistic user numbers and inflated revenue forecasts. Combine the two and you have a recipe for disaster.

Absolutely.

I’m enchanted by the idea of muni-wifi even to the point that I almost bought fifty (50, countem) mesh nodes from Meraki for deployment around Belfast.

  • This hardware was to be funded out of my own pocket.
  • There were going to be 3-4 network uplinks funded too, out of my own pocket – yes, using cheap-ass broadband links.
  • This was to cover the city centre as best I could, providing free (sign-up based) access to t’internet.
  • This was to invite others to assist by providing backup links, sharing bandwidth.
  • I hoped to entice additional mesh links via Belfast City Council.

I approached Belfast City Council and was told there was no need for something like this because BT was already providing BT OpenZone for £6 an hour. Seriously.

My desire for this was based on the number of times I wanted faster access to the Internet when I was in town. At the time I only had my Newt (with WiFi), my laptop (with WiFi), my Nokia N800 (with WiFi) or my iPod touch. I see less of a need for it these days because of my iPhone and the unlimited data plan but speedier access is still welcome. Because of unlimited data plans along with telephone calls and texts, the cost of data has reduced to effectively zero. This is going to make it hard in the future to justify any charge-based networks in the future. I certainly never join BTOpenZone networks these days.

While I love the idea of it, I have no confidence in the ability of councils to deliver. It’ll have to be private companies and then how are they to make money.