Saturday, September 20, 2008

free wifi, eh? evil telcos to the rescue!

about a month ago i wrote how telcos want to nickel and dime (and by nickel and dime, i mean $5 and $15) their subscribers for every little feature. i want to expand on that with how they also want to/will kill anything that would threaten their stranglehold on your wireless communication needs their cash cow.

a long time ago, a city wanted to roll out a free or subsidized low-cost wireless network:


and in three months, some evil telco convinced the governor to make it illegal for a city to provide such services. how is it possible to make this "illegal" is beyond me.


image courtesy of: prickwear.com

here's a nice article that wraps all of this up from an interesting source. how and why does the UK have any interest in this is amazing.


fast forward a few years:


and now, free wifi is under attack as a health scare?


although there's no wireless provider officially involved with that uprising, i bet dollars to donuts one of them are. anyways, let's not forget the land based telcos.

the attempted assassination of the internet by twisting the net neutrality principle would have been a major coup for the few ginormous ISPs. the FCC are trying their best to keep the network free and open - but that's not stopping the telcos from going in to their bag of dirty tricks to choke out your options.

image courtesy of: njvadala.blogspot.com

hell, they'll even resort to bribing, kickback, payout or what ever you want to call it:


ha! lying - now i see how they get these lawsuits, legislation and health scare "facts" through the system. how naive of me.

or is it because they do not want any competition by making up excuses lobbying for laws that is in the telcos best interest. smash your options if it's going to save you money. and if they can take your money by force law, they will.

image courtesy of: freemagenta.nl

this rant will be concluded on my next P2P article.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nick, I hear you bro'...

what do you think of the google white space proposal?
http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/muni/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206905633

i guess the ultimate dream here would be an end to monthly cell phone bills, just dialing out on the free wifi network...(although i hear skype on wife is not the greatest)

gobind

Nick Shin said...

i've tried to figure out a way to put that info into the [ iphone vs gphone ] article, but it didn't fit too well. since the gphone is coming out, i figured that i'll revisit this topic then - especially after i have posted the rest of my "evil telco" rant.