A girl in my econ class today told the story of how she sold internet at the airport. Apparently, she and her cousin read that the airport wouldn’t have wireless that day, so they took the light rail to the airport and sold their own wireless off of the hotspot on their phone. They made $500 before being shooed away by police for standing in one place for 4 hours.
I thought that this was a brilliant example of the free market working - and price gouging too!
They saw an unfilled need. They got their tools together. They sold a useful product to people obviously willing to buy it. The customers were happy. The girls were happy. All sides win.
If that’s the case then I challenge your submission for “the real question”…I would say the real question is…how the hell did she get to the terminal…just bought a random ticket, went through security, and let the airline constantly call out for her saying the flight was about to leave?
It could have been a small airport where the users would have been well within the range of the router and she need not have gone through security. The airport in Santa Barbara comes to mind.
So you mean she hung out in front of the security line and convinced people that they would be able to access her signal (which she had no way of verifying…for herself, or them), they paid her cash, then went through security and trusted not only that she was telling the truth about being able to utilize her signal, but that she would remain there until their flight departed?
It’s not as if Internet service is a physical good that she had to hand to her customers… Haven’t you been to a hotel that sells Internet service to its guests? There can be a pop up that pops up when a user connects to the network that the girl set up.
So you’re suggesting this high school girl was able to set up an online pay-access firewall that allowed her to accept online payments before granting access to the www when people connected to her wifi signal…from her laptop?
Well. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that this amazingly technologically savvy high school girl didn’t manage to set up such a system from her phone.
But if you want to take the laptop out of the equation, and assert she did all this on her handheld device, that’s fine by me.
Because it’s more descriptive, more interesting, and sounds better than “this person”?
Plus, since you bring it up, I suppose one could say that it is relevant because the whole point of my statement was to illustrate the severe unlikelihood of what you’re saying actually being the case, and the fact that this was a high school girl doing all this makes it a lot less probable, as, as unlikely as it is for anyone to accomplish such a thing, the odds are incredibly less that it would be someone with those two characteristics, as being high school age and being female are two characteristics that are incredibly rare in someone with that level of computer know-how and ability.
How about we ask Wheylous to ask the girl to write out how she did it and everything and that some men are bickering on an econ forum about the in’s and out’s of a hypothetical involving her.
Assuming that a high school girl was able to set up an online pay-access firewall that allowed her to accept online payments before granting access to the www when people connected to her wifi signal, from a cell phone
Or maybe people paid her in cash and she gave them the password to her mobile wireless hotspot? I’m not an expert on how mobile wireless hotspots work.
Ha, yeah, I figured people would just pay in cash, and go to an ATM if they only had their card, and when the customers came up, “sold their own wireless off of the hotspot on their phone.”
Pretty simple to figure out isn’t it?
Or if not that one of those wireless usb connectors, and sold the time to people who have their own laptops, etc.
