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Wednesday, January 15, 2003 |
get yourself connected, writing's on the wall
I'm thinking about Clay Shirky's essay Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry. ZapMail was FedEx's effort, back in 1984, to produce a high-priced service using fax machines in FedEx offices to provide 2-hour delivery. It tanked because there was no good reason for its customers to pay inflated prices to FedEx when they could buy their own fax machines.He predicts similar failures for telecommunications companies and wireless ISPs that are trying to sell cheap services at expensive prices. He may be right about wireless. Right now, in any town I want to use wireless, I have to buy at least two subscriptions to get decent coverage of the places I want it. I don't, because my employer provides a network I can use for free; a local bookstore provides both wireless and wired connections (University Bookstore, on the 2nd floor balcony, if you're in Madison) and Muddy Waters, acoffee shop near my house, has both an iMac and a wireless connection if I need to get on the network.
I can easily believe in free, community wireless offered by business that are seeking the traffic. Currently, as a customer I can expect to pay $30-40 month for a wireless connection I could use on a network at places like Starbucks (service through T-Mobile: they don't even provide coverage in Madison, yet).. I probably need two to get decent coverage (here in Madison, I"d have to add Cafe Connection; in the Bay area, I'd have to add Surf-N-Sip).
On the other hand, as a store owner, I could buy a wireless access point for a little over a hundred dollars, get a DSL or cable modem connection for about what just one of my customers would be paying, and offer the service as a free come-on.
I'd much rather have store owners offer me free wireless than have them offer me free music: most of the music they play is awful, and I"ve got both an MP3 player and a laptop loaded with music I like (stores pay ASCAP fees for everything they play: even if it's just a commercial radio station they have playing).
There's an issue currently where many standard ISP contracts prohibit the user from sharing their connection, but I think this is due to go away. A coffeeshop offering wireless will probably provide less load on the network than a typical home user with a teenager running Kazaa: people don't go to coffee shops to run servers, whereas home users do.
