Telepocalypse

The FONey war

OK, I can’t resist posting. I’ve been a good boy, done my day’s alloted work (OK, I should have phoned the VAT man, maybe tomorrow). The kids are asleep for their afternoon naps.

The News Du Jour is that a company called FON are starting a “user-sponsored” public WiFi network. I saw their pitch at the ETel conference, and you have to be impressed by their passion, if nothing else.

There’s plenty of places to go read the PR blurb and the blogospheric commentary.

First, the good news. This aligns with what I’ve been saying for a long time, namely that the locus of innovation in telecom will move to how networks are priced and financed. When the user and owner interests align (because in some respect they’re the same folk), nobody cares any more about capturing the consumer surplus of the stupid network.

Now the bad news. I think they’ve started with the hardest case first, which is consumers. The highest possible cost per added node, the lowest revenue per user. A more promising start might be enabling public-service workers to roam among localities, or companies to have reciprocal rights in business parks.

Sadly, it also highlights a screw-up in how almost all corporates set up their networks. Somehow, physical connectivity within the building is seen as a great way to ensure secure access to networks. (Hey, all the contract cleaners are trustworthy, aren’t they?) The sensible alternative would be Internet access everywhere in the building, and get people to VPN in. If you find that VPNs are too expensive, you’re buying your networking gear from the wrong vendor. This also avoid the frequent and ridiculous situation of visitors being unable to get Net access. Some of those folk are $’000s per day consultants you’re working hard to prevent from being productive. Anyhow, FON isn’t easy to do for corporated because they’ve embedded security policy in the access network, the exact opposite of what the end-to-end principle tells you.

So FON is a very risky venture, where unless they find some seed markets onto which to condense a critical mass of connectivity, you’re just left with isolated islands too disparate to justify the effort of membership. After all, our friendly open networks “Linksys” and “default” are pretty ubiquitous, too. I want them to succeed, but it looks like the kind of venture that you need to bung $1bn at to get it started. But as a way of Google kicking sand in the face of some telcos, maybe that’s an affordable budget.

PS - it’s cold enough here in Vilnius that the snow is just precipitating out of the air near the freezing ground — blue sky above! Was -19C when I arrived last night, and felt it too.