Bring Back the 80's!

Wireless Roaming

Anyone who was paying attention to WiFi and simultaneously watching TV last year knows that Oregon Trail Internet toyed around with offering wireless internet access to fixed-point and to roaming customers downtown. Their signal was unusuably weak everywhere I tried, they used no encryption so anyone could sniff your traffic, they didn't even use SSL so you could sniff other people's login credentials. They gave you 128K (twice the speed of dialup) roaming for $20/mo, and charged businesses $130/mo for a half megabit wireless signal. Here is their ratesheet. They were recently bought out and have deprecated their wireless service. Eg, I dunno if they plan to leave present customers in the lurch, but they are not seeking new business or avenues of expansion.

Webformix (where I work) is also currently deploying WiFi downtown for roaming and fixed-point service. Unlike OTI, we are offering 1 megabit synchronous fixed-point connections for only $25/mo, residential or business (or whoever, we don care :) We are currently covering the northern part of downtown, but will soon expand over the rest. Our infrastructure is amazingly less expensive to deploy, while providing magnitudes better coverage than OTI did.

One thing we have not decided on is a price point for roaming customers. We will make it cheaper than OTI's roaming deal, and it will probably be a megabit of bandwidth, maybe half a meg, but we are still open to suggestions. What I want to know is, for you guys, what would you pay to have roaming internet access downtown? Your connection will be as secure as the computer on your end is capable of doing (open with SSL login, or WPA with SSL login, or WPA-Radius.. with WPA2 available next year) with cable-quality bandwidth and 60ms ping times. You can sit down in front of merendas or barcelona or out in the park and get a connection every bit as good as you get at home. And secure, unlike Beletazza's, so you can't be airpwned and people aren't reading your webmail. What would you pay to have that? Monthly, or anually? (It is so inexpensive that I'm leaning towards annually)