
Wi-Fi Unusability - wkoszek
http://www.barelyusable.com/wifi-unusability#.Va1UK96mMcY.hackernews
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jdmichal
OP wants a mesh network. But Wi-Fi is not a mesh network implementation.

Also, Xfinity is a terrible example. As far as I know, the publically-open
side is a separate signal with separate bandwidth allocation. It does not use
or effect your paid connection at all. Hence why one can set up a wireless
router to bridge the the public network into the private one for extra free
bandwidth. This also alleviates all of OP's concerns.

Bottom line is that people pay for internet access as a resource, and people
are generally not in the habit of giving away paid resources for free. The
only way this will happen, IMO, is a municipality or otherwise large funded
entity taking it on to provide free access to a wide area.

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bluehazed
If I don't inherently trust devices on my network, even if I can throttle,
block, and do whatever else from my router, why should I let them on it? And
why is this a problem that needs to be solved?

I can maybe understand the sentiment of wanting to make the best of unused
resources, but this thinking is a bit naive and doesn't bother taking into
account privacy/security/bandwidth issues, etc.

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wkoszek
I feel like if the Wi-Fis were implemented correctly and instead of silly
password/username we'd have 1 identity-certificate to all Wi-Fi networks, we'd
all feel better about it. Something like what actually exists: Eduroam
network, where students from different universities can use the Internet on
different campuses. But it's just not widely spread across the industry.

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bluehazed
I can see where you're coming from, it's just not really feasible with private
networks, due to liability or security issues and plain old NIMBY.

So maybe the idea here should be to instead implement some sort of
nationalized/globalized public network; however this also has it's own set of
issues (public funding being overshadowed by the existing need/demand for
private networks, again liability issues (although with an identifying
authentication scheme this is less of a problem)).

