Ideas for Apple: AirPort Mobile Tethering: “The previous segment looked at how Apple is uniquely situated to deploy ubiquitous WiFi by offering iTunes affiliate commissions to encourage casual AirPort sharing. A second issue Apple is poised to solve relates to iPhone tethering. Here’s what the current problem is and how it could be solved”
(Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine.)
An interesting article from Daniel Eran Dilger that bears some reflection. I think that there’s definitely some legs to this idea, especially with the integration of a microphone with the latest iPod Touch. Some interesting variations on this theme are already starting to crop up here in France.
We’ve seen that with some of hacked Linksys firmware options that you can publish more than one Wifi network from the same base station, permitting you to open a public channel to the internet that coexists securely with your own private network. This approach has become a standard procedure here with the French ISPs, notably Orange with the UNIK service and Free.fr with the Freephonie. Basically, these services offer a standard VOIP service for all subscribers as long as they are in range of another client’s Wifi network. The Free service has already been beta tested with the publication of the Siphon iPhone application, and they have promised a version on the App Store this fall.
UNIK goes a step further and integrates this with their 3G telephony service so that you can switch between 3G and Wifi communications and are reachable on your 3G phone number, whatever the connection.
The promise of ubiquitous Wifi is unfortunately far from the reality that I (and others) hoped for. Most providers have horribly expensive offers and most are protected by pretty lame web authentication front ends, making seamless use impossible.
The Fon service is an interesting foray into this world, but not the sort of thing that your average consumer is likely to jump onto and is hobbled by the same authentication issue.
If we want to see ubiquitous Wifi, we need to bring the average consumer into the fold, in a simple manner. Apple is perfectly positioned to push out a firmware update to enable this kind of option. The question of payment or lack thereof is a huge one. I’d like to see an option to publish a freely accessible network, with an option to either do some QoS or bandwidth throttling in order to make it less interesting for P2P freeloaders, but sufficient to do VOIP.
I think that it makes the most sense to see this tied to the MobileMe service than to Apple Store user accounts and then it becomes yet another reason to justify buying into the service.
From a publishing standpoint, I would be more than happy to to set aside a little bandwidth for anyone nearby that needs the connection, and I would be doing so right now if the tools didn’t conflict with my current rather complex Wifi setup.
As a consumer, I want a seamless connection from my portable, iPhone or iPod Touch. I don’t want to be nickelled and dimed to death with usage fees and if there’s a flat fee to pay, it had better be reasonable.
Thinking it through, it seems to me that the simplest method would be a tit-for-tat approach for MobileMe account holders. You configure your Airport Base station with your account, which advises Apple that you are a participant, thus giving you access to other enabled Airport Base stations.
This would be an excellent method for Apple to add some serious value to the MobileMe service with minimal infrastructure additions. They already have the back end LDAP authentication infrastructure1 which serves the me.com web services, the App Store, the iTunes Store, the developer site, the discussions forums… and the Airport firmware already supports RADIUS authentication - it’s just a question of ensuring that the servers can handle the additional load.
Once the service is in place, that really opens the door for VOIP services from your iPhone or iPod touch. Apple could arrange to put in place a mapping system so that people could “call” your MobileMe account which you link to your phone number as a connection of last resort, checking if you’re online on a Wifi connection first. This may be why we still haven’t seen iChat on the iPhone…
What really works with this idea is that Apple is the only company capable of offering this service since they own the whole stack: hardware, software and service.
- I don’t know for sure that they’re using LDAP, but it would be the logical technology for them to be using. ↑