An interesting idea

Here's an interesting idea, courtesy of John C. Dvorak - once higher bandwidth wireless routers become ubiquitous, allow a setup whereby you can share a smallish (say about 50 mbps) chunk of your bandwidth as an open connection, for the benefit of the general wired (unwired?) public. His point is that while wifi hotspots are more ubiquitous now than they used to be, there are fewer open hotspots (as is good security policy). This slice of open bandwidth would be sandboxed off of the rest of the network, and would have bandwidth caps, to prevent abuse, but would be left otherwise unencumbered - a way to share internet connection, and provide an easy public service - it would certainly increase the usefulness of portable wifi-enabled gadgets (iPhone, netbook, Nintendo DS, laptop, I could go on ...) by about an order of magnitude, and reduce people's reliance on expensive, slow cell phone data plans, perhaps give the telcos a bit of competition in that field (which is always good - telcos are pretty evil, and could use some competition to make them listen a bit better).