Just because something is a great technology doesn’t always mean that people will want to use it.

A team of grad students at UIUC have developed a way for people to securely share their bandwidth with their neighbors. Called Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming (PERM), the device allows users to choose the best internet connection available among the current pool, and alerts the connection owners if there’s any misuse with their bandwidth.

I don’t think the average user is altruistic enough to install a system to let their neighbors safely share their WiFi access. IMNSHO, this kind of technology is best suited for situations where a group of individuals choose to share a single access amongst themselves, such as in a multi-family dwelling or shared office environment.

You can tell a bunch of people who are used to sharing stuff came up with this. What they don’t realize that once most people graduate they forget about community values and wind up defending the stapler in their cubicle as if it were made of gold.