“Two: don’t bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you’re building is nice and all, but you’re putting it into people’s hands and you’ve got no idea what they’re going to do with it. They’re going to hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on your ass day and night.
“What’s more, they’re going to open it up to the rest of the world and any yahoo who has a need to hide what he’s up to is going to use your network to commit unspeakable acts—you’re going to be every pirate’s best friend and every terrorist’s safest haven.
“Three: don’t bother. This isn’t going to work. You’ve got a cute little routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you’ve got a model that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you’re going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it’ll be a gigantic failure.
“You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: a cheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towers and condos—building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay—they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, so they’ll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, and you’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 what to 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 warning nudge 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 this hardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Why the hell would we want to do that?”
“Because it pays pretty well,” Lyman said. He was shaking his head a little, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it, going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papers and clicking of pens and laptop latches.
Alan held up his hand. “Lyman, I’m sorry, we’ve been unclear. We’re not doing this as a money-making venture—” Kurt snorted. “It’s about serving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access to tools and ideas that they wouldn’t have had before. There’s something fundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: It means that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. So we’re trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartily appreciative of your advice, though—”