Disintermediation...it's back!

October 2, 2004 9:10 AM

Robert Cringley tells the story of Andrew Greigg, WiFi entrepreneur extraordinaire:

Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it.

The rest of the column goes into the details.

I got the same feeling when I was at Lycos in 1999, and a colleague started talking about the thousands and thousands of MP3s he had all on hard disk. Instantly accessible, none of that stupid 100-CD changer crap. 5 years later, everybody's got one that fits in their pocket.

Disintermediation...it's back! (10.02.2004)

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raging red:

Gives new meaning to "off the grid."

Sat Oct 2 2004 11:04 AM

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