"Significantly improved speed and the 'always on' feature of
wireless routers have been driving the rapid spread of broadband
Internet access in many residential areas," said Haiyun Luo, a
professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. "More than 56 percent of homes in the United
States already have Internet access, and more than half of those
homes are using Wi-Fi wireless home networks." A typical
residential user accesses his broadband home connection about 12
to 15 hours per week, Luo said. "So, while the Internet
connection is always on, most of the time it sits idle." Luo
would like to see that idleness put to good use by benefiting
other users, and he and graduate student Nathanael Thompson came
up with a way to do it. Luo and Thompson have developed a
software framework called PERM (Practical End-host collaborative
Residential Multihoming) that allows neighbors to pool their
Internet access and thereby improve both performance and
resilience. "PERM exploits the divers