Wifi Co-ops Already In Progress

ArsTechnica wrote today about a proposal published by students at MIT and the University of Cambridge touting wifi co-ops as a way to offer public wifi and avoid the roadblocks facing roll outs of municipal wifi initiatives. What they are proposing is to use tunneling to pass visitor traffic through the host wifi access in hopes to avoid guest activity becoming the host responsibility, one of the primary concerns to sharing wifi access for a host, as well as insuring that the guest’s traffic cannot be subverted by malicious hosts, a primary concern for guests. Sounds like a win-win proposal however, ArsTechnica isn’t sure the ISP red tape will allow it to become a viable alternative to municipal wifi.FON is already doing this with the La Fonera gateways (map). Their gateways provide two encrypted wifi subnets, one for the host and one for the guest and routes the wifi guests through their authentication gateway. Guests on the FON network must have FON accounts and there are fees for guests that are not providing a FON gateway in a share and share alike plan.FON is a wifi community that purports sharing your wifi and being a part of a community. FON has been around a few years and I personally got my own FON router in the summer of 2006 and have been sharing my wifi ever since. FON has spent the last year building partnerships with major Telcoms and broadband providers including British Telcom, Neuf Cegetel (France), and Time Warner. Such partnerships break down the barrier that some providers restrict broadband sharing.FON has already been building municipal wifi networks in partnerships with localities and providers. In October 2007 it was announced that BT had partnered with FON to build a wifi network in the U.K. and shortly thereafter FON announced that through a partnership with the City of Geneva they were distributing the FON wifi routers to residents to build a wifi network for residents and visitors.One of the major concerns for hosts, or broadband customers that share their connections via an open wifi access point, would be how the guests’ internet activities could affect them. Hosts would be bound by their terms of service on their contract and could have to implement measures to ensure that wifi guests did not breach their TOS agreements. Aside from those TOS obligations, by offering wifi access the host would technically become a provider and thus be protected under the Safe Harbor act as long as it met the requirements of the provision.I have found the FON system to be a viable wifi sharing system and think it would excel as an alternative for municipal wifi. The system would reject long-term leechers as they would either have to share wifi through their own accounts to qualify for access or pay per use for the connection as well as discourage malicious guest activity as their accounts are tied to their homes’ broadband and/or payment accounts.There is a viable alternative to municipal wifi that is already being adopted on a global level and with the partnerships FON is building with telcoms and broadband providers, it is well on it’s way.