thestormglass.com

I've recently been doing some reading about the 'freethenet' campaign in San Francisco and the Meraki mesh network devices.
Let me say firstly, I'm not assosiated with Meraki in any way - these are my own thoughts.

Usually, I'd find the whole idea of community driven wifi networks...well...scary, but the Meraki 'system' seems to inspire something in people akin to the open source software movements...just look at Firefox. It certainly has inspired me. Although I've often been interested in community projects, none have captured my attention long enough or provided me with the interest needed to devote what little spare time I have. Perhaps this particular project is a little closer to home given the state of the Internet in Australia and being a Mac user...but I'll get to that shortly.

There are groups starting to pop up to help co-ordinate the distribution of the Meraki hardware, Free Australia Wireless as an example. I commend their efforts, although I'm slightly (selfishly) disappointed that there is no Free Melbourne Wireless website as yet, I'm sure in time, that will come - there already is a Facebook group and a Google groups mail list. The great thing about this is the idea that 'you' can help without being a member of any particular group or require any special skills. You are free to add devices, and bandwidth to the mesh as you see fit.

The Sydney arm of Free Australia Wireless got sick of waiting for the government to provide the city-wide wifi they were promised and went about bulk ordering Meraki hardware to do it themselves. Free Canberra Wireless are steaming ahead too, their advantage being the city is much smaller than Sydney or Melbourne so things can happen, and happen fast.

This must be a scary idea for companies like Telstra. In the news again today yet another victory speech from the telco that they have 'successfully enabled ADSL2+ in 900 exchanges'!. That's fantastic news, but 'the mob' is already starting to 'route around' Telstra, their ludicrous pricing and various attitude problems. The balance of power can rapidly tip back in favour to the general public, although it is a way away at this point - the potential is there.

As a Mac user, especially now, wireless just comes with the territory. If you have any modern Mac, you have wifi. If you have an iPod touch or an iPhone wifi is a staple. While cheap wifi may be more common elsewhere, in Australia we are quite undernourished (compared to my perception of the demand) when it comes to free or near-free access to the Net where ever and when ever you need it. This looks as good a way forward as I've seen and the best thing about Meraki is its simplicity. Something that is at the core of the Mac and therefore should be easy for us as Mac users to relate too.

Over at netlife.com.au there is a brilliant blog entry about their personal experience over the first 5 days of contributing to the Meraki mesh. This guy has met his neighbours and already earned $20 to recoup purchase of the hardware. It's not perfect by any stretch, but what is? All you can do is have a go. From the blog: "And to adapt a phrase from the Treasurer of the last Federal Government: "Get a Meraki for yourself, one for your husband and one for the country."

As I said earlier, you don't need to be associated with any group to contribute, but there are some advantages not least of which is bulk buying. Given the friendly and knowledgeable community here at Mactalk I thought it would be interesting to open this up to you and hear your thoughts, comments and ideas on contributing to 'freethenet' with Meraki here in Australia (or wherever else you might be!).

Not only is this a way to contribute to your local community and the wider community but also a way to do something for yourself. I'm sure I'm not the only one that wished my iPod touch wifi worked at 'that cafe at the corner'.

Zillatron

This is the future, like it or not. The reality is, if you fight it - people will steal it anyway. It happened with music and it's already happening with video.

There can be no denying that people will pay for things if they think they are getting value for their hard earned. With MacWorld 2008 only days away I thought it would be interesting to use MacWorld 2007 numbers so there is a direct comparison once Apple announce the 2008 numbers. At MacWorld 2007 Apple had passed 2 billion songs sold. It took 3 years to get to 1 billion songs then just 10 months to get the second billion. That's 5 million a DAY. 
Again, at MacWorld 2007 Apple announced that 50 million TV shows had been sold and in the first 4 months of movie sales, 1.3 million sold. So...it works. But we still can't buy one TV show or Movie in Australia, or a whole heap of other countries. What gives?

The rumour-mill is full of iTunes movie rental whispers...can you imagine what that would do for Movie numbers? Let's have a guess - 1.3 million in 4 months in the US and select European nations, price rentals cheap enough and I'd bet that number would start pressing half the music sales numbers per year. I picked a random movie on the US store and it was USD$14.99, a quick conversion to AUD$16.78. So presumably we'd pay about $19.99. That's still cheaper than buying most new titles in a physical store. TV shows tell the same story, USD$1.99 we'll end up paying about AUD$2.99. 

Is that really that much for the convenience of having the video there, ready to go whenever you feel like watching? No ads. Just press play. I don't know about you, but I don't really have time to be screwed around by TV stations that start shows late, randomly play repeats mid-season, cut the end of sentences so they can trim 30 seconds off the running time of the show to squash in another ad and then cancel the show or move it to 11:30pm Monday night because it doesn't rate. Then when we do eventually get the show on DVD, it's priced so high that it's not affordable - unless you wait another 3-6 months for it to become 'cheap'.

The beauty of this model is that consumers get to buy what they want and the show gets supported. I understand that in Australia (and elsewhere) the complexity of buying shows made in the US or UK adds significantly to our 'buy price' but that doesn't mean we need to get ripped off, or worse still, not have it as an option at all.

Every time I read 'reports' about how much piracy is costing the studios and how much it drives the cost of producing the content I can't help but laugh. They don't make the content available, then complain when people steal it. Blame the pirates! Arrr! iTunes hasn't removed piracy from the music industry, but it sure hasn't made it worse. The current business models were developed a long time before the Internet and digital distribution was viable. For some reason there seems to be this notion that if you cant fit the square peg in the round hole, you just need to get a bigger hammer. Pushing high margin models doesn't work anymore, high volume is the only way to stay relevant. Just look at how many online music stores have come and gone before and more so after iTunes, the story is almost always the same, to expensive, bogus rentals or limited support.

I read the other day that in this new digital age that 'Lo-fi is the new Hi-fi', how true! People download lower than broadcast quality TV shows every day from BitTorrent and watch, with no ad's, whenever they feel like it.  HD-TV is great, no argument - the bottom line is that when it comes to day-to-day TV, I'd gladly trade HD for SD if it meant I could watch at my convenience. 

Production studios seem to be on an agonisingly slow ride to understand this simple point - Give them what THEY want and they'll buy it. Give them what YOU want and they'll steal it.
The sooner they understand this, the sooner I can start paying them for my fiance's favorite nightly soap opera...*sigh*

Zillatron