David,

I understand your comments but actually basing a municipal wireless network on a software infrastructure is mad.

Sure, Whisher is possibly not bad for sharing with a neighbor, but no much else.

municipal wireless needs to be managed, and have an element of control, not just a bunch of random connections. Whisher and any other software method are still in their infancy and if they ever do make any impact do not think for one second that exploitations will start to appear rapidly (Worms, Trojans etc) targeted directly at networks running these applications. Your assuming that Joe Blogs actually knows how to secure and monitor his network for his own security and that of the guests who connect… your in cloud cuckoo land.

David,

Thanks for your comments. In my opinion (and through years of experience working with wireless technologies) WiFi is -not- a reliable technology, and it was never meant to be used to give city-wide blanket coverage. Buildings with metal structures, lead and copper piping, wet tree leafs, vehicles, make signals available one minute, and not the next. If you really wanted guaranteed coverage, the co-channel interference would kill throughput totally, as the AP density would be enormous. The reason cell operators don’t go about putting microcells left, right and center is that they very carefully calculate coverage based on the actual terrain, and can shape their cell’s coverage patterns by using panel antennas and careful power control - none of which is available in standard WiFi.

Secondly, what is the business model behind MuniFi networks? Ad-supported? It has been shown that usage is so low, even on well-covered areas, it is simply makes no economic sense to pour millions into the infrastructure. And even then, a minimum quality of service cannot be guaranteed - San Francisco was going to be made up of…802.11b!

In our view, the only model that makes sense is for people to build their own infrastructure through sharing, so that if enough people do it, your chances of finding an occasional signal to connect to will increase - note, it will not be guaranteed, only increased. And once you know a certain place has coverage, maybe you will include it in your daily movement patterns, for example, to quickly check your email while walking the dog

The question of security is moot if there is no financial gain on breaking such network. If you run like an WISP, people -will- attack you, but what would be the reasons for Joe Blogs the Bad Hacker to break into an WEP or WPA-protected WiFi, when he probably has lots of open ones to choose from? I would venture that 99.9% of infected machines today happen through the owners visiting websites with malicious content, receiving infected email, or installing pirated software with nasty “plugins”, -not- by a passer-by jumping on someone’s protected WiFi after cracking their encryption and going through the process of discovering their network topologies, attack vectors, and executing.

There is always a risk, but if we took the same approach with other activities, we’d probably never ever leave our homes. One has to find a balance between the willingness to accept risk and the potential reward.

We’re not interested in building a commercial infrastructure out of home-based WiFi; we will build a network by the people for the people. In my opinion, MuniFi as we know it has failed. Even Google is backing other ventures that take a similar approach (in their vision) to us.

wisher is also nearly dead. no appearance in technorati any longer. it was only a little hype, pushed to make good living for a few people, burning VC. nothing else…..!!!

So I assume that you have seen our businness plan, analyzed it, and extracted these conclusions? I mean, do you really think 8 months is enough to pronounce a new company dead? We don’t so you can keep ranting all you want…

I have to agree with Mike Webber on this one.

You keep making references to your “business plan”. If it’s such a good business plan, does it not include plugging your service? Seem that you forgot a key part. If I am wrong, are you prepared to make public some of the plans?

Have you seen Apple (to give an extreme example) making even their next-day plans public? Never mind a three or four year plan. I never heard business plans have to be public, so if there is a particular thing you want to criticize, please do, but don’t just throw “it’s crap” up in the air without anything to substantiate the claims.

My criticism is on people who dismiss something based on a few months of progress, when all we have been doing is concentrating on the product, not on publishing bullsh…er…’retouched’ statistics, like other startups are doing. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘plugging’, but if you refer to publicity, read my previous sentence. We’re now going to get into that, having a more mature product.

Many startups that are on the news every day currently have been running for four or five years, I guess they had their own share of critics in their early days. If you have something constructive to say, then go ahead, otherwise, your words are empty, basically, because you have nothing to go by.

People go on what they see and what you do. Your forums and number of users is uninspiring after all these months, sparse AP’s.

No thumbs up from me

Jack

Whatever. I rest my case - people are blind and deaf…when we say we have concentrated on product, not user adoption, is there something unclear? Do these words produce some sort of funky chemical reaction in the brain that blocks people? Is it that hard to understand? And why doesn’t anyone answer this point, and keep insisting “you have almost no users” when we clearly explain the reasons?

Some people in the company are asking for these sort of bland and pointless comments to be removed (or not accepted in the first place), and even though I approve them, more and more I see they basically make no sense, and contribute nothing. Constructive criticism is always welcome however.

The coverage maps are looking better and better, meaning that there are many people using Whisher out there.

We now have to make sure that people know about our product and I’m sure the global WiFi network we’re building will grow like hell.

And to all these loosers who don’t believe in what we’re pursuing I just want to say that they don’t really matter to us.

To all the rest, thanks for keeping an eye on us. We’re onto something very big and challenging but genuinely cool.

Hello 4all,

Important commercial and ad suported hotspots companies will push up whisher hotspot number to be one of the best hotspot social proposal worlwide.

This , managed, controlled and persistent networks from dozens of WISPS WORLWIDE will provide WHISHER a good future.

WHISHER IS REALLY COOL. AG, SPAIN

nobody really should distribute private passwords to the public, only psychopathic guys would do so. so whisher is a falsc concept

Steve,

We are not distributing passwords to the public - the owner of a hotspot is *securely* distributing his password to whoever he wants: to other registered Whisher users (i.e. not the general public), to only his buddies (i.e. not even the rest of Whisher users), or only to his closest VIP users. At no time is the password/key in the clear, it is stored encrypted, which is a lot safer than posting it on a piece of paper and passing it around, don’t you think?

I think I am a heavy user of Whisher
I really like it. Tried it with some friends and it works fine.

The heat is on! Muncipal wifi may be coming direct from big ISP’s. If BT can be hooked up to this type of thing, then for sure others will follow. This is great news for us BT customers

[Link removed]

Zamir (or is it La Vista? or something else…?):

The news are good, because BT users will also be able to share their hotspots through Whisher. The more WiFi out there, the better for us - remember, we work with *all* hardware, we don’t need to reflash routers, not even that of ISPs.

Also, please contact someone if you think your comments are being unfairly deleted, rather than shill and complain on other blogs. I was away at a conference, and didn’t have time to moderate the posts. Only thing I removed was your link, we’re not going to give them free publicity on our own blog now are we?