Bandwidth From Strangers (WI-FI)

instant000

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-31/bandwidth-from-strangers-challenges-at-and-t-verizon?campaign_id=otbrn.bw.tech


I had proposed an idea like this once before, but it wasn't on the idea of "I'll get some of your bandwidth now, in exchange for credits" , such credits you get to use later." Mine was about "sharing." ... but I guess I wasn't realizing the point about how phone plans are capped, so you really can't freely share.

My idea was that people would actually volunteer to participate in a service mesh (kinda the same way you can contribute CPU cycles to a massive project, you could contribute a little of your bandwidth to share with others). Then, to augment the service provider network, you have the customer network mesh, providing you bandwidth when you need to burst something, but idle otherwise.

I could see something like this really taking off, now that someone has put it out in the open in a way that someone might cash in on it.

Wouldn't it be great to hop on the mesh when you'd hit your monthly 5 GB cap?

I must admit, I'm not the type to do too much data transfer over Wi-Fi, as my month-to-month phone recently expired, and I've not bothered to get it re-activated yet, and it's been three days....