Bob Frankston: Hotspots Cold Cells.
" The current telecommunications infrastructure has one overriding purpose
-- to generate billable events. It is a tragic mistake to assume that this is
the only way we can pay for vital infrastructure since it is an extremely
inefficient and dysfunctional system that extracts an unbearable cost on
society." [ Tomalak's Realm] [ [ t e c h n o
c u l t u r e ]]
And the
next two paragraphs...
The term wireless has been appropriated to mean
"faux wire". The cellular phone system emulates land phones where you pay per
wire not per phone. That "wire" is used for billing and the system provides
you with cell phone circuits that have the same limitations as their wired
counterparts. It's no surprise that the cellular industry created Bluetooth
which tried to recreate the limitations of the wire only without the
wire.
This is in sharp contrast to
802.11 which just transports packets and the connections you make have no
inherent limits because the packets can be relayed to any other Internet
connection in the world. But it isn't easy to control or bill for the packets
-- they aren't easily metered like phone calls. Even if you can count the
packets it is difficult to charge for usage when a video stream can use a
thousand times as many packets as an audio stream. You wouldn't be able to
tell whether a web page costs a penny or a hundred dollars to
visit.
9:28:00 AM 
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