company.
"So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A giganticbudget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- likea model train set the size of a city.
"That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting abattleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done,but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you'vemade any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.
"But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow andplodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover thatwe've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones withvideo screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of ourcustomers still can't figure out voice mail. Some of them can't figureout touch-tone dialing. So we're slow. Conservative. But we can do lotsof killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, andwe can provide this essential service to the world that underpins itsability to communicate. We're not just cool, we're essential.
"So you come in and you show us your really swell and interestingmeshing wireless data boxes, and I say, 'That is damned cool.' I thinkof ways that it could be part of a Bell's business plan in a coupledecades' time."
"A couple decades?" Kurt squawked. "Jesus Christ, I expect to have achip in my brain and a jetpack in a couple decades' time."
"Which is why you'd be an idiot to get involved with us," Lyman said.
"Who wants to get involved with you?" Kurt said.
"No one," Alan said, putting his hands on the table, grateful that theconflict had finally hove above the surface. "That's not what we're herefor."
"Why are you here, Alvin?" Lyman said.
"We're here because we're going into the moving-data-around trade, in anambitious way, and because you folks are the most ambitiousmoving-data-around tradespeople in town. I thought we'd come by and letyou know what we're up to, see if you have any advice for us."
"Advice, huh?"
"Yeah. You've got lots of money and linesmen and switches and users andso forth. You probably have some kind of well-developed cosmology ofconnectivity, with best practices and philosophical ruminations andtasty metaphors. And I hear that you, personally, are really good atmaking geeks and telcos play together. Since we're going to be a kind oftelco" -- Kurt startled and Alan kicked him under the table -- "Ithought you could help us get started right."
"Advice," Lyman said, drumming his fingers. He stood up and paced.
"One: don't bother. This is at least two orders of magnitude harder thanyou think it is. There aren't enough junk computers in all of Toronto'slandfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing butthree hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, andthis city is all trees and buildings.
"Two: don't bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you'rebuilding is nice and all, but you're putting it into people's hands andyou've got no idea what they're going to do with it. They're going tohack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be onyour ass day and night.
"What's more, they're going to open it up to the rest of the world andany yahoo who has a need to hide what he's up to is going to use yournetwork to commit unspeakable acts -- you're going to be every pirate'sbest friend and every terrorist's safest haven.
"Three: don't bother. This isn't going to work. You've got a cute littlerouting algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you've got a modelthat may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you'regoing to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on thefloor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it'll be a giganticfailure.
"You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: acheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towersand condos -- building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay-- they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, sothey'll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, andyou'll only need one on every other story. And those people *use*networks, they're not joe consumer who doesn't have the first clue whatto do with a network connection."
Kurt had stiffened up when the rant began, and once he heard the word"consumer," he began to positively vibrate. Alan gave him a warningnudge with his elbow.
"You're shitting me, right?" Kurt said.
"You asked me for advice --" Lyman said, mildly.
"You think we're going to bust our balls to design and deploy all thishardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Whythe hell would we want to do that?"
"Because it pays pretty well," Lyman said. He was shaking his head alittle, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it,going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papersand clicking of pens and laptop latches.
Alan held up his hand. "Lyman, I'm sorry, we've been unclear. We're notdoing this as a money-making venture --" Kurt snorted. "It's aboutserving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access totools and ideas that they wouldn't have had before. There's somethingfundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: Itmeans that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. Sowe're trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartilyappreciative of your advice, though --"
Lyman held up a hand. "Sorry, Alan, I don't mean to interrupt, but therewas something I wanted to relate to you two, and I've got to go in aboutfive minutes." Apparently, the meeting was at an end. "And I had mademyself a note to tell you two about this when I discovered it lastweek. Can I have the floor?"
"Of course," Alan said.
"I took a holiday last week," Lyman said. "Me and my girlfriend. We wentto Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister, who's doingsomething for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she's into, I don't know,saving children from vampires in Afghanistan or something, and she hasInternet access at the office, and can't see any reason to drop aconnection in at home. So there I was, wandering the streets of Genevaat seven in the morning, trying to find a WiFi connection so I can getmy email and find out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.
"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafés, I can find asignal for a network called Swisscom. I log on to the network and I fireup a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don'thave one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card witha temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smokeshops open and start asking them if they sell Swisscom Internet Cards,in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, theylook at me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug,and go back to work.
"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guytells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they're in shortsupply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow ashow they'll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that's fine. Thirty wholeminutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only abouta zillion Swiss pesos. Don't they sell cards of larger denominations? Ohsure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days -- and each one costs about doublethe last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as muchas you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments-- about three hundred dollars Canadian for a week, just FYI.
"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but verySwiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese atbreakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But three hundred bucks for aday's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find aseven-day card or bust. So I ask at a couple more hotels and finallyfind someone who'll explain to me that Swisscom is the Swiss telco, andthat they have a retail storefront a couple blocks away where they'dsell me all the cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.
"By this time, it's nearly nine a.m. and I'm thinking that my girlfriendand her sister are probably up and eating a big old breakfast andwon
dering where the fuck I am, but I've got too much invested in thisadventure to give up when I'm so close to finding the treasure. And so Ihied myself off to the Swisscom storefront, which is closed, even thoughthe sign says they open at nine and by now it's nine-oh-five, and somuch for Swiss punctuality. But eventually this sneering kid with lastyear's faux-hawk comes out and opens the door and then
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