The Amazon Kindle device uses a 3G network (they call it “WhisperNet” which is awfully precious, no?) to download books to the device “in under a minute”.  Presumably, they’re just paying Sprint or someone for the airtime, and there’s a SIM card inside the case.  Amazon offers an integrated web browser on the Kindle, and its use is free.  Free.  Browse to your heart’s content over a high-speed cellular connection, to any site you want, and Amazon will pay the OEM supplier for the airtime.

Thing is, though, it should be somewhere between “easy” and “not all that difficult” to clone the SIM card; forge a MAC address; whatever.  Maybe the traffic all goes through Amazon, and there’s a key exchange.  Somehow Amazon knows which Kindle is which, and can server-push books to any Kindle they wish, and this should give us some hints.  Whatever.  Not impossible.  So all one would need would be a dead Kindle or — here’s the thing — a working Kindle with wireless turned off (there’s a physical switch), and one could use “Whispernet” on a Linux laptop.  Yes, for free.

I hesitate to write this — although (haven’t searched) it’s probably been discussed of before — because this would be the absolute death knell of free Amazon browsing.  And it is mega convenient to check Gmail on my Kindle at a tea shop or whatever.  But there will be a resurrection real quick.  Here we have a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars product line that ships with, presumably, free 3G (from the device) forever.  Now we have a precedent.  Amazon pays whomever (my money’s still on Sprint), but this (if Amazon have done their projections right) is lost in the clinking coins.  Mobile data networking is getting faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, and it may rapidly reach the point where it’s too cheap to charge for.  And, of course, telephony and SMS can all be done on the Web, and better.  Amortize it over, what?  The cost of a $70 PC-CARD?  A $5 “all you want” gift card you can buy at Starbucks?  Or have it offered as a loss leader for something else (maybe something like On^★Star which, somewhat ironically, puts a low-efficiency and imprecise actual person in the data loop)?  Fifteen years ago I was doing research in ubicomp.  All our ideas were things like “you take something the size of a credit card to one of the many kiosks in a public area and….”  Ha!

What I do know is:

1. It’s 15 years later.
2. There are people at least as smart as I working on this.
3. Lots of them.
4. And they’re working in groups.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:53:06 +0000
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