Winds of change blowing on broadband sharing?

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 24 April 2007 13:23

Your IT - Home IT

Two separate pieces of news suggest ISPs' previous hard line against letting outsiders use your domestic Internet connection may be softening.

In many countries, sharing a connection is forbidden by most ISPs' terms and conditions. In Australia, this is the case with Telstra's BigPond and OptusNet, to name just two.

But in the US, Time Warner has done a deal with Spain-based Fon, allowing Time Warner broadband customers to share some of their bandwidth with neighbours or passers-by. Fon participants get free access to their peers' hotspots, others must pay around $US2 per day.

Something similar is happening in our part of the world. As Stewart Corner reported today, New Zealand-based Tomizone has a similar arrangement , has just done a deal with D-Link to include its software in certain wireless routers, and may have something in the works with major Australian ISP iiNet.

Tomizone's financial arrangements are slightly different - there's no free access for participants, but they do get half of the fee paid to Tomizone ($A4 per day). Participants can, however, grant 'friends and family' free access to their own hotspots.

Apart from ISPs' terms and conditions, the other stumbling block with this sort of arrangement is that it only really works with 'all you can eat' plans. For example, if you're on a BigPond plan that charges $A0.15 per megabyte for excess data and you'd reached the limit for the month, your marginal cost could easily exceed the marginal revenue.