I was talking to my hosting provider (we have a rack there), and we were talking about marketing and finding customers.

He had mentioned this to me over a year ago, and was talking about how difficult the law was making it to boost his wifi signal beyond a certain area.

I was confused - why would he want one?

Why not? I’ve got a ton of bandwidth available and I’ve got the equipment also. It’s a fantastic way to get my company name out there in front of everyone.

I laughed. And then I realized what a genius he was. With Toronto-wide WiFi, people will be looking to connect wifi. And every time they do, they see a nice little ‘PriorityColo - Web Hosting’ provider (which actually works well too). For geo-centric websites, where the location of the server is very important, PriorityColo is exactly who they are looking for (while living in Toronto I had 3-8ms ping times to my servers).

Imagine setting up something like this near hotels or other busy areas. You could even extend it, and not even provide service (though I would consider that very lame).

Anyone know the finances behind getting a T1 and setting up a wireless access point?