[H-GEN] Wireless, the NBN and the Sun

[Russell Stuart]

Some while ago Gary, Scott and myself were sparring over the NBN.  Gary
said the NBN's charging model was all wrong.  The NBN charges your ISP
$24+GST a month for the equivalent of the existing copper connection
connected to both the phone and ADSL at the exchange, which is roughly
equivalent to what Telstra charges now for the sale thing.

Gary didn't like that model.  He wanted a NBN username/password that
allowed him to use anybodies NBN connection, anywhere, anytime, and have
it be charged back to him.

At the time I thought it was an absurd idea.  I still do - the NBN can't
work that way.

But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced it would be
possible to layer that sort of model over the NBN.  If I were doing it I
would base it on OpenWrt.  Set up something that had private and Guest
ESSID's.  The Guest ESSID would act like a giant captive portal, where
you authenticated yourself with my servers and the router reported your
data usage back to the servers.

Given that a byte transferred over mobile wireless is currently 10 times
more expensive than a byte transferred over a land line it should not be
difficult to come up with a charging scheme that worked for everybody.
The guest user gets a cheaper and faster connection than he would get
with his phone, I get a cut, and the NBN land line owner gets to make
money from his NBN connection.  In effect, it turns every residential
line owner into a wireless ISP, competing with the likes of Telstra.

Wonderful.  Except now I discover it has already been done.  Not here,
but in Europe:

  http://corp.fon.com/en/this-is-fon

Is there nothing new under the Sun?