September 13, 2007 – 11:02 pm
A few years, A friend who ran an ISP and I decided to launch a public access wireless network. Nothing excessive, no masts or dishes or custom rolled kernels for a WRT sealed in a box. Just a few DSL links in Cafes and Restaurants for people who might need a bit of net with their coffee. No charge, no “key this code into a captive portal for 15 minutes of internet”. Open your laptop, associate to the network, do stuff. Of course, as you can probably guess, people loved it at the time. I got a few feedback entries from the “l33t h4ck3rs” telling me they’d hacked my wireless network and there was nothing I could do to stop them from doing it again, but things were generally good.
At one point we had upwards of 10 sites going, but over time it’s dwindled back to 2, mainly as business change hands and the new owners don’t see the benefit of having a wireless network “just anyone” can use, and want to restrict the access to people who have bought a large part of the menu. I had access to the LNS (radius for ISP) side of the network, so I could see what sites were connected, and what ones weren’t, when they were last seen, etc, which allowed me to do some proactive work in regards to keeping the host sites happy and feeling like a provider actually cared about them.
Unfortunately, my friend wound up his ISP earlier in the year for a number of reasons, and sold his client base to a few ISP’s. The new ISP that bought up the links I was using obviously didn’t want to give me access to their LNS, so when the two remaining sites have problems, I need to ring their support line,wait around, talk to someone, be escalated, put on hold, etc. A job that took 30 seconds, now takes nearly 30 minutes. But, they were perfectly happy to charge me the same amount of money as my friend was. I eventually got tired of this as one site experienced several drops out a day, so I decided to churn their connection to another ISP I’ve been working with. We negotiated a timeframe that suited the restaurant, I sent emails out to the groups that I know use the internet connection when they meet at the restaurant, and the churn got submitted.
For what ever reason (and as always happens when Telstra is involved in anything), there was a problem with the churn that was scheduled for today, and the line is currently in a locked state. Sure enough, at 7:00:01pm tonight, I get an upset phonecall from the convenor of one of the groups asking if I can “hurry the churn along”, as they are meeting there and wanting to use the Free wireless. The fact that I haven’t heard a peep out of any of the groups that use it when it is working, and get nothing but grief when I attempt to improve the service makes me wonder if it’s worth it, and highlights (to me) one of the larger problems with Free software;
Everyone loves you when it works. When it doesn’t work, you better not show your face round these parts.
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