This probably has to do with the fact that it's 1:00 in the morning and I'm still awake, but I just had kind of a crazy idea. I live in a reasonably small community of 50 townhomes. The homes are arranged in 6 unit buildings and are quite close together. I'm wondering if I could sell internet service to the owners of the other units.
My unit is fairly close to the middle of the neighborhood and I'm thinking that if I got a decent aftermarket wifi antenna and put it in my attic I'd probably have a chance of covering all or most of the neighborhood. Given how close the units are I'd really only need to cover about a 300 foot radius from my house.
I'm only paying about $45 a month for my 7Mbps down/.5Mbps up connection and I can upgrade to a 15Mbps down/.5Mbps connection for an additional $10 a month. I figure if I upgrade to the faster service and resell it at $10/month if I can sell to one person I've paid for the upgrade, up to 5 people and I'm getting a nice discount on my internet connection and 6 or more people and I'm making a little money.
Plus $10/month is a pretty good price for high speed internet service, so I'm thinking I could probably pick up a few people.
Of course, my biggest concern is that I don't know if this would violate the TOS of my cable modem provider, but I'm guessing it does. If I have to pay for a commercial connection then it's probably going to be too much to make it worthwhile.
My other big concern would be making sure I could get a strong enough signal to reach the whole neighborhood. I figure I can spend a couple of bucks to get a decent antenna, but I don't want to dump a lot of money into this.
I'd have to worry about billing and controlling access and all, but I figure I'm probably not going to get that many people to jump on this, so it shouldn't take too much admin time. My new router (with DD-WRT) allows me to create multiple SSID's, each with their own security, so I figure that if someone signs up I'll create their own SSID and WPA key. If they don't pay or decide to stop using my service then that SSID gets disabled. That way I can add and remove people without affecting anyone else.
I dunno... what do you guys think? Am I totally crazy or does this sound feasable? I certainly don't expect to get rich off of this, but if I can get free internet access or make a couple of bucks a month I certainly wouldn't mind.
Brett
My unit is fairly close to the middle of the neighborhood and I'm thinking that if I got a decent aftermarket wifi antenna and put it in my attic I'd probably have a chance of covering all or most of the neighborhood. Given how close the units are I'd really only need to cover about a 300 foot radius from my house.
I'm only paying about $45 a month for my 7Mbps down/.5Mbps up connection and I can upgrade to a 15Mbps down/.5Mbps connection for an additional $10 a month. I figure if I upgrade to the faster service and resell it at $10/month if I can sell to one person I've paid for the upgrade, up to 5 people and I'm getting a nice discount on my internet connection and 6 or more people and I'm making a little money.
Plus $10/month is a pretty good price for high speed internet service, so I'm thinking I could probably pick up a few people.
Of course, my biggest concern is that I don't know if this would violate the TOS of my cable modem provider, but I'm guessing it does. If I have to pay for a commercial connection then it's probably going to be too much to make it worthwhile.
My other big concern would be making sure I could get a strong enough signal to reach the whole neighborhood. I figure I can spend a couple of bucks to get a decent antenna, but I don't want to dump a lot of money into this.
I'd have to worry about billing and controlling access and all, but I figure I'm probably not going to get that many people to jump on this, so it shouldn't take too much admin time. My new router (with DD-WRT) allows me to create multiple SSID's, each with their own security, so I figure that if someone signs up I'll create their own SSID and WPA key. If they don't pay or decide to stop using my service then that SSID gets disabled. That way I can add and remove people without affecting anyone else.
I dunno... what do you guys think? Am I totally crazy or does this sound feasable? I certainly don't expect to get rich off of this, but if I can get free internet access or make a couple of bucks a month I certainly wouldn't mind.
Brett
You definitely would have to upgrade to a business solution, and even the cheaper business plans don't allow you to do this.
