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bandwidth, first make sure they want to share.

Well, there was "Consume". http://www.consume.net/ but their DNS is FUBAR'd so I'm not sure they still exist.

http://www.wlan.org.uk/operational_wlan_sites.html

IIRC It's all still hampered quite badly by the 100mW EIRP limitations for 2.4GHz within the EU.

wack in your postcode at Consume and it should give you a map of hotspots in your area (its national), you never know a hotspot might be next door to you

A conspiracy theory.

WEP is broken by design. A few engineers who don't know anything about cryptanalysis making their own encryption system that turns out to be broken is quite plausable however wifi standards are set by the IEEE. The IEEE is not stupid.

Was WEP deliberatly broken to make government snooping easier?
That may seem ludicrus now but what if the likes of consume suceed in their goal of building mesh networks across citys? Securing wireless connections at VPN or application level is so much hassle that only 0.01% of users bother.

The reaction of the American government to the new Chinese wifi encryption standard lends weight to this theory. Supporting WAPI just means hardware manufacturers have to write a bit more software. Once it's in the software it will no doubt be supplied as standard worldwide. It may actuall be secure with little work. Why else would the American government threaten retailation over somthing so obscure?

They've got the skills, they've got cheap consumer hardware, they've got bugger all infrastructure. Like a lot of developing countries, if you want decent wide-area networking it could well be easier to skip the copper stage completely and move on to radio.

(consume.net, if you don't know, is a project to create ad-hoc WANs using 802.11 hardware on cheap PCs. Each node acts as a router for all the other nodes; packets get passed from one node to the next, with automatic route discovery and all that. It's very cool.)

What's more, given the state of their government and regulatory authorities, it'd probably be quite easy to grandfather in some nice high signal strength limits. At the moment, noone cares how strong your transmitter is. But it'll be regulated eventually, and once there's a decent amount of infrastructure running at 5W a node, it'll be politically infeasible to order it all to be torn down.

Something like this has been going on in London for absulutely ages. Check out the link Consume The Net

I'm in Brighton rather than London, and hotspots are popping up everywhere around here, what with Consume nodes, Pier to Pier, and Loose Connection wiring up some of the local pubs. You can even use it on part of the beach if that sort of thing floats your boat.

The LocustWorld Meshbox site
Seattle Wireless
Bay Area Wireless Users Grou BAWUG
Kingsbridge Link Community Wireless Network
Consume.net
Meshnet, low cost nodes

We really have a chance to make this wave of the 'net' very different from the previous round - and that means taking control and offering an alternative vision (see Consume).
Who care about what Business Week says? It's about as interesting as 3G phones from their end - ie not at all interesting, just another way to part us from our money. Yes, let's all buy wireless cards, but learn the lesson of P2P and make them available to all.

Yes, Boycott corporate media!

Like you hint, we also need to create our own media outside and beyond, building an alternative to dull, uniform, lifeless world of the multinationals. Projects like IndyMedia and Consume.net are already doing it. It's empowering to build the solution, as well as refusing to participate in the problem!

Fanx for a brilliant post...

San fransisco, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Adelaide, Sydney, London, Rotterdam, And more

See FreeNetworks.org, Consume or Wireless Anarchy for more.

...do exactly this.

But, assuming you mean by an "Orinoco card", a wireless Orinoco card, you could always check for open community LANs in the areas you are travelling. At http://www.toaster.net/wireless/community.html there's a list of open wirless LANs, including four such LANs in the UK, one specifically in London.

in response to all the people posting "so how do i stop evil k1dd135 using my bandwidth?" - why not just stick to secure (ssh, https) protocols and share it?

Granted this isn't suitable for a lot of business networks, but still - wouldn't it be cool if you could walk down the street and stay connected to icq without getting your ass kicked?

Good afternoon, Mr Troll.

One URL should solve your question.

Consume.net does this in the UK. Click on the "nodes" link from the main page.

It was not intended to be used as a mobile phone, rather it was a work around to the restrictions that prevented pay phones being installed in many locations, and the fact that most pay phones were vandalised constantly.

Unfortunately, shortly after Rabbit was launched, the laws were changed to allow more pay phones to be installed (by companies other than BT), so it kind of under cut Rabbit.

This combined with the fact that mobile phones became portable (as opposed to tethered to a car battery) meant the Rabbit didn't really stand a chance. Rabbit was really a case of too little too late.

One point about Rabbit was that you got a base station to use in your home. This base station could also be used by other Rabbit users to make calls if they were in range. This meant that the Rabbit network got larger as more people became customers, just like current community WiFi initiatives such as Consume et al.

I messed up the link. Should have been http://consume.net/

Don't forget Consume.

If you're in the UK, consume.net is trying to create such a registry.

The real power of these devices will be seen if the potential of wireless networking to be a community resource that takes internetworking out of the hands of the mega-corporates.

So these have a lot more potential than a GPRS phone.

I take your point, but I think Matt's reasoning (which I agree with) is that to get online via a wireless node you have to know where it is.

To find out where it is, you have to online. Unless you see a visual clue - this is one way of doing that. My consume node is the one in the picture.

...because I am one of those people trying to seriously encourage community wireless and if that activity is seen to be some sort of cracker plot it will be damaged.

I want the local computer users near me to buy wireless cards and log into my node, they aren't going to buy the cards if they think somebody is going to use them to steal their data.

Showing off the soekris Net4521's which consume.net may be adopting as there weapon of choice.

The french guy with the singing birds and the cybernetic parrot sausage is Paul Granjon from zlabs.

BT are simply trying to squash the free-Wireless networks springing up all across the UK. High-speed, free internet without going through the local loop? As if BT would ignore it.

You'll probably see them moving to make public wireless illegal soon, or at least to difficult to do properly.

Now is the most important time to setup a wireless network in your local community! Or join an existing one!

We already have public access wireless in the UK - look at this for instance.

And this is running at a faster rate!

The RA (equiv to FCC over here) has not actually licensed any commercial use of the 802.11 band here yet and it may be BT trying to force a decision from them.
As yet what they propose is illegal in the UK.

Consume the net anyone?

consume.net in the UK are pioneering this kinda thing. There's also a whole raft of other community based wireless links at Wireless Anarchy.

Al.

HantsWireless - Hampshire Wireless

SurreyWireless - Surrey Wireless

Also you may be interested in the Edinburgh Wireless network --- Backnet which is a little more established than Glasgow. Both projects are generating a lot of interest but we need as many people as possible so if you are interested then check out the Consume.net Node Database to find out who's near you.

The GlasgowNet page also has some news, reviews and articles that may be of use to people interested in Wireless networks. Both Backnet and GlasgowNet have IRC channels so feel free to come on and have a chat. The Backnet channel is #backnet on irc.backnet.org.uk and GlasgowNet is #glasgownet on the same server. If you don't have an IRC client then GlasgowNet is testing a Java applet IRC interface that you may want to try.

There's a pilot scheme called Consume in London. More details in the BBC article. The idea is that the network is made up of "nodes": PCs with wireless cards, and people connect to that. It's supposed to be low cost and community-based, and seems like a really nifty idea!

I've tried using consume.net and sflan.com. I even used to enjoy Ricochet. I was unable to connect to either free ISP because their node maps were either innaccesible or just wrong. I have visited the consume.net page many times and the node database has not worked for at least a year. At SFLan.com they actually have pictures of base station locations, yet when I have sat in immediate proximity to a base station, no signal at all is available. The problem with the anarchistic, volunteer, free wireless lan projects is that they do not, and perhaps cannot, provide even the most basic quality of service. It should not be easier for me to "hack" (and I use that term very loosly) into an unsecured wireless base station than to connect into a legitimate station. As well, the free base stations tend to be in houses and offices. Although I spend quite a bit of time in my house and office, that someone twenty miles away has a working wireless setup really does not amount to a hill of beans. I think that most of us here on Slashdot would give several major bodily organs to have true pervasive free wireless internet, if only in places like SOMA or SoHo. For even this pipe dream to sober up, we need to vastly increase the signal strength of the wireless access points. Instead of concentrating on building wireless ghettos, we should try to lobby our congress, and for you non-Americans your legislative bodies, to increase the broadcasting strength of our wireless access points (wap). Perhaps it might even be prudent to have two legally allowable types of waps. A legally non-open hub facing the current power restrictions and a hub open to the public, by law, that would have ten times the signal power. That would cause this movement to gain resonance.

On a smaller scale this could also be done with the advertising ballons. Im looking mainly networking using systems such as consume, however hills, and weather become a major problem in the highlands of Scotland. An advertising balloon, with an antenna, a bit of coax as long as the balloons hoist cable, and you have an ariel that can get nice and high for coverage, and be winched back down for gales and bad weather.

Im sure there will be many impracticality's pointed out in this idea, however, hopefully it will inspire some other ideas.

I would suggest the Orinoco RG-1000. It has dialup, ethernet, NAT, is hackable, can be flashed with the latest Airport Firmware, and if you know the right People, can be had for $50 or so.

I've got one, and I love it.

There are a bunch of other projects like this. Including my own Ashland's Wireless Internet Project (AWIP) http://awip.truffula.net

Also there's....
http://personaltelco.net
http://seattlewireless.net
http://bawug.org
http://free2air.org
http://consume.net

a lot of these have been mentioned on slashdot before....

They're cool though :) (hence why i started another one...)

so what, its 5x faster

what does that matter? What people want more is *any* bandwidth (and 802.11b can do 11mps anyhow) - where there is none, what does speed matter when its > than a slow modem anyway?

I'm part of the london consume.net project here - see what they have to say about it. Oh, and if you're in london join in. Especially in soho, i want to read ./ while in the pub.

~themocktor

Have a look at consume.net to see a practical start on encouraging wireless neighbourhood peering through boosted 802.11b antennae in the UK. They host a database of active and potential nodes, so you can get an idea of whether you'll have anybody to peer with when you put your pole up.

consume.net is aimed more at connecting people over hundreds or thousands rather than tens of metres, and the recommended kit reflects that at £500/$750. But once you've got your mighty 802.11b antenna and lightning rod up, there's nothing to stop you talking to your neighbours on their wimpy little PCMCIA cards as well.

Consume the Net is where its happening in the UK. These are their aims (copied form that link above)
#aims The aims of consume.net are;
define a sustainable network strategy
utilise low cost and existing networks
impliment wireless LAN technology
optimise infrastructual expenditure
reduce network connectivity costs
increase network speed
re-distribute access
promote common ownership
increase resilliance
aggregate avaliable 'internet' bandwidth
develop top level peering status
and of course have more fun

I went to a meeting last night held by some guys from consume the net, a London-based community wireless project. The question-and-answer session brought up some questions that didn't seem to have been solved:

1. If I share my Internet bandwidth with the rest of my street, what's the incentive for my next-door neighbour to increase the communal bandwidth?
2. Same question, but from a different angle. Since the ISPs' business plans rely on underuse of bandwidth, isn't it obvious that a sucessful bandwidth-sharing project will lead to either withdrawal of service, or increased charges?
3. Everyone will be looking to get maximum coverage out of their antennas, and the current cards tend to lock onto the strongest signal. If I set up an antenna on my chimney, am I going to deny service to the graphic designer trying to use his AirPort card next door?

Overall, the guys running the project were helpful, and obviously trying to move forward by consensus. I think I'll buy the kit and get involved. However, there remain many problems with such schemes, both technical and legal, and it's only worthwhile getting involved at this early stage for the 'how does it work' factor.

You can buy Lucent Orinoco cards for 110 UKP these days: http://www.consume.net/buy However, you will also probably need connectors for an external antenna and a PCMCIA -> PCI/ISA card.

It's here, and speaking of which I wonder how its getting on: I havent had a look for a couple of months.

• 802.11b [has a] distance of 100 or 300 meters

Or you can shunt it through a 14dBi antenna and get a couple of km out of it. I wonder how well Bluetooth devices will work near a consume.net node? Ask yourself this: do you care about that .bomb yuppie screaming into his Bluetooth headset, or do you want to participate in an unregulated network of clued peers?

• But there also is no standard for 802.11b radio output power. [...] 1 or 2 dBi gain out of the antenna, you'd be doing even better.

Bah! Your 802.11 has no honour! consume.net are hosting a project to form a wireless network, using 5 - 14 dBi antennae. Power to the people. ;)

... it's based on 802.11

http://www.consume.net/

"Fed up with being held to ransom in the local loop, phased by fees to ISP's, concious of community? OK so lets build a fresh network, one
that is local, global, fast, expanding, public and user-constructed.

This website outlines the strategy for such a network and the progress being made toward its establishment.

We now have a searchable database of CONSUME nodes operational or proposed.

Please Register your NODE..!"

First we must replace the IP proticals with something more secure and expandable

IPv6

unless we where to implament a p2pnet we would need somewhere to connect to localy. The

In it's twilight years, Fidonet nodes (esp. in the country) didn't dial each other up (national call), they routed their information through the internet (local call). You can do something similar - ad-hoc local networks, relying on cheap internet links for connection to distant networks. As the local nets grow and coalesce, the internet links become needed less. (Helps to be in a densely-populated country - say UK or Hong Kong)

Third killer apps are needed. Chicken != Egg

"!="??? Anyway. Games. High-bandwidth, low-latency local connections. In fact, look at the traffic on any university campus network (open MP3 fileshares, porn, the odd discussion board, lots of network games, etc. etc.). This is what network traffic on your community network should look like.

All of these obsticals where overcome the first time we built the net so it can be done again

What obstacles??? The obstacle of having millions of dollars of government money and hundreds of researchers to play with?

Oh, and I should mention consume.net about here. And nobody has considered service-level agreements - there are no guarantees from a hobbyist network.

Consume the net!

Check out Consume in the UK.

• I have a cable modem, which costs me around £20 per month. A lot of the time I'm not really using it. [...] we did this in Aberdeen, Scotland, three years ago

I'm in the same situation, and am very tempted to set up a consume.net node near Glasgow. The recommended kit is £500 (~$750) plus an old PC. That in itself is not a barrier to entry, but the problem is that I'm in a suburban area (in a ground hollow, even) and the chance of actually finding a consume.net peer is low.

Perhaps the most valuable service that alternative net projects could provide will be to track the (approximate!) geographical locations of live nodes, to encourage people to join, or to start new clusters in the knowledge that they will soon be joined by other peers.

Damn links..... real link here

Fed up with being held to ransom in the local loop, phased by fees to ISP's, concious of community? OK so lets build a fresh network, one that is local, global, fast, expanding, public and user-constructed.