Ah, Yes, The Lamppost As A Wireless Access Point

from the sounds-awfully-familiar dept

Wed, Mar 23rd 2005 2:18pm — Mike Masnick

Stop me if you've heard this one before... A wireless technology company wants to put wireless access points up on lampposts all over the UK to establish wide area wireless data access. Of course, this was the same plan that Metricom had way back when with their Ricochet service (still in some sort of existence after being bought and sold by a bunch of different companies). In fact, I still think many lampposts around here have Ricochet boxes on them. In other words, this isn't a particularly new idea at all. Putting access points on lampposts just solves one (small) issue -- but doesn't answer many other questions, including how well the mesh technology works and (much more importantly) coming up with a decent business model.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

3 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 23 Mar 2005 @ 3:16pm

No Subject Given
Thats interesting... a company in detroit was talking about doing the same sort of thing on the freeways so drivers could have wireless internet while driving in the city. Check them out: http://www.getzing.com
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Tim, 24 Mar 2005 @ 2:14am
  
  Re: No Subject Given
  That's interesting. Theoretically it could be illegal to use a mobile phone whilst driving but not to surf the 'Net? ;)
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Jared, 23 Mar 2005 @ 3:30pm

Vandalism
What about kids or idiots that want to see who can be the first to throw a rock and knock the thing off or damage it beyond repair?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]