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.