Open Wireless Movement Confident It Will Get ISP Support
ISPs have incentives to join the new Open Wireless Movement, said Adi Kamdar, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF leads the OWM initiative for wireless subscribers to open up parts of their networks so they can be used by anyone. The movement is comprised of eight groups and EFF -- including the Personal Telco Project, Fight for the Future, Free Press and New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. The capability for users to make their wireless networks open is “kind of at the whim of the ISPs,” Kamdar told us. OWM is focused on “working with them to figure out a solution,” he said.
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There are at least a dozen ISPs “that don’t forbid running an open wireless connection in their Terms of Service,” said the OWM website (http://bit.ly/Sm8e0j). While major, nationwide ISPs have yet to join, Kamdar told us that OWM members are hopeful that they will. “People are recognizing the need for open wireless,” he said, pointing to Comcast’s decision to make its Wi-Fi service free to people in states affected by Hurricane Sandy this week.
ISPs can utilize their users’ open wireless abilities “as a selling point,” Kamdar said. “There’s a big market opportunity around open wireless,” he said, because ISPs could be able to charge a few dollars more monthly for wireless that can be opened up. He said ISPs can place a bandwidth cap on the wireless segment that users choose to make open, so individuals looking to use the open wireless can only do so for a small period of time or for less bandwidth-intense tasks before hitting that cap.
Wireless users who choose to open their networks shouldn’t find themselves liable for what others do on them, Kamdar said. “There are legal safeguards around protecting yourself.” That includes the safe harbor provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which removes liability from the ISP if the provider has a repeat infringer policy in place, he said. In this case, the ISP would be the wireless subscriber opening up his network, Kamdar said. “None of this is for sure. None of this has really been tested in court.” EFF is confident that these protections will hold up, he said. Additionally, the OWM website encourages open wireless providers to display a guidelines and policy page to users looking to access the open networks (http://bit.ly/Y1QDyJ). To address security concerns, the OWM website includes resources about securing open wireless networks.
Opening wireless networks is “technically impractical, financially unsustainable and dangerous from a security standpoint,” said Brett Glass, who runs Wyoming-based Lariat, a small wireless and wireline ISP. “Our ISP’s terms of service prohibit the use of open access points, and we insist upon securing every customer’s network before we will turn on service,” he told us via email. In addition to security concerns, opening wireless networks “invites crime,” Glass said, “by inviting piracy that is difficult to trace.”