Free Wifi: Why Open Mesh trumps The Cloud

It was around 2003/4 that we saw the opportunity to apply social enterprise to community broadband. This was at the time we'd published our business plan for tackling UK poverty, with a business model serving the community.

One of the actions I took locally was to invest in a Hotspot-in-a-Box from The Cloud. I first establised that this was acceptable, describing my aim to provide wireless broadband service to the community 

This was acceptable to The Cloud and I set up the hotspot in my roof space. The deal was that the hotspot owner paid up front' for indefinite service and in return received a percentage of revenue, though it never earned me a penny 

Though little used It worked well for a while. IN an area with no cellphone reception, I learned that a local RAC man was using it to pick up callouts. Then the public service just ceased.

I contacted The Cloud who explained that this public service feature was being "abused" and for that reason had been turned off, though it was difficult to understand how it was being abusied since the cost of internet traffic was my own. 

Their managing director wasn't best pleased when I pointed out his initial confirmation od usage, he had he said already spent considerable time in responding to my enquiries. I got two vouchers for logging in for my own use which soon expired.

In mre recent times, The Cloud was taken over by the Murdoch media empire and petty soon I was being told that I was running an unlicensed hotspot. The new deal trumped my original contract and required payment of £35 a month, which was difficult for me to justify with no revenue.

Last week I took delivery of an Open Mesh access point and the same day was delivering a public service to our village.

One of the most valuable features of the Open Mesh system is the ability to customise the splash page, such that local information can be delivered to the community.  

Public Wifi for commmunity benefit

Our philosophy

Back in 1996, our founder's position paper for Bill Clinton's re-election committee, had argued the case for a new business model for social purpose. It said this about the application of information to local economic development in the then dawning information age:

"The greatest initial social and economic risk of the Information Age is in creating two distinctly different classes of people: the technological haves and have-nots. Those who have access to information and information technology have a reasonable expectation to survive and prosper. Those with limited or no access will be left out. This holds true for individuals as well as nations. The key to the future is access to free flow of information. To the extent that the free flow of information is restricted or diminished, people will be left to endure diminished prospects of prosperity and even survival.

In order for economic development to take place in any given location, the very first thing required, before anything else can possibly happen, is information. This information includes first and foremost where to look for the necessary resources to do anything. If new businesses are needed, knowing they are needed and finding funding for them are two very different things. The first step is to locate possible capital resources in order to move forward, and this step is no more and no less than information. Once resources are located, the next step is what terms and conditions are involved in obtaining those resources -- more information. Once this is known, paperwork must be completed, business plans made, market research and due diligence conducted, and all of this compiled and forwarded to the appropriate parties. Again, nothing more than information. In fact, most of the work involved between identifying a need and solving the problem is information acquisition and management: getting and developing information.

As Alvin Toffler predicted in Power Shift, where once violence and then wealth were dominant forms of power, information is now becoming the dominant power. Those nations with the greatest freedom of information and means of transmitting it have now become the most powerful and influential, and the strongest economically. Toffler also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union would come about due primarily to its authoritarian control and limiting of information. Unfortunately for Russian citizens, this old habit has continued for them beyond the collapse of the former Soviet Union and will at the least make an interesting case study on the survivability of a once strong nation which still remains committed to limiting and controlling information."

At the same time as installing The Cloud, ouf founder had been in Crimea, reflecting on the warning he'd made about dispararity in wealth distribution and how we wrongly determined that others were less important than ourselves.   

Reflections from Crimea, 2003

A new way of doing business

The 1996 paper reasoned that the real purpose of business was people, concluding:

"Just changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around--if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be "Me first, mine first"; rather, "Me, too" is more the order of the day."

This philosophy of sharing resources appears to be congruent with Open Mesh, a philosophy which over the last decade has shifted from marginal activists like ourselves into mainstream business thinking and leaders like Unilever's Paul Polman who sees the future business based on embedded social and economic purpose. A philosophy which even now, The Cloud seem unable to comprehend when they refer to "Free Wi-Fi."    

Capitalism: The new 'bottom line'

As we'd said in the 'Marshall Plan' for  Ukraine, 

"It is enough to understand that nothing whatsoever can happen in terms of social, economic, civic, and political development without communication. To the extent that communication is limited or completely absent, development is equally limited. If demonstration of this is needed, each reader is invited to do the following. For the next week, do not speak, do not write, do not read, do not listen to or access any form of communication in any way. With those restrictions, it might still be possible to survive for a week. Extend the same restrictions indefinitely, and basic survival will be at risk. It is almost impossible to imagine life without communications of any kind."

It was a close call for some last week when BT cut off most of the telephone lines in our village for 2 days , ironically digging to install fibre broadband cables.