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One of the problems associated with using 802.11b cards to connect to public internet points is the necessity of finding the access points. Last night, despite a good map, I could not find several Consume nodes in London. Perhaps this device will save me the trouble of holding my Powerbook like a baby while I walk down the street in the future.

The term "IP Sharing" in this article is known as NAT or IP Masquerading to the rest of the world. There are a number of companies selling "IP Sharing" boxes that just do NAT.

It sounds like users in Korea are wiring entire blocks of flats for network access, sharing the cost of a single ADSL connection. That wouldn't be so bad, but then they put a web server on their connection criticising their operator for banning the practice in the ToS. Big mistake, there are tons of other places to put up your web site, like geocities. If you are going to bash a telecom, do it from another part of the internet, not on the wires they control.

This is just another battle between one business who supplies a scarce service to consumers, and other businesses who supply boxes to relieve the scarcity.

I've been trying to find a supplier of consumer grade internet access (DSL, cable or even dial) who will allow "group" access for small wireless installations. These would be similar to groups in major cities all over the world who want to create an alternative wireless internet, with a number of gateways to the wired internet. This has been difficult for consumer level access, but is possible with high cost professional style leased lines and individual ports on router.

The economics of consumer grade connections means that a restricted (in ToS) connection to a single computer can barely use more than .05% to 1% of the available bandwidth during any 24 hour period, and their profit calculations count on this. When approached by a non-mainstream use, they don't really understand how it might impact their severely under-engineered systems, so they get very obnoxious and end the discussion. However, if you are willing to spend the money, you can get a professional grade connection with very liberal ToS, but only over leased lines.

the AC

I wonder how many nodes of the type recently described here on /. you could buy for $250,000. Instead of a boat with 20PCs why not run a cheap and dirty 803.11b network and connect these communities permanently?

tele2 has been around for around 2 years, if I remember correctly. Their roll-out to other areas of the UK is frustraitingly slow, unfortunately. It's an off-shoot of a http://www.tele2.dk/">Danish company, but my Danish is not good enough to determine if they're doing wireless there.

The UK is interesting because of the relationship between BT, the cable companies and all the other phone companies. BT is moving as slow as possible in rolling out ADSL (it's only just become available in the last couple of months), and the cable companies are largely ineffective in providing cable modem access (largely thanks to the rapid consolidation in the industry, and the problems in integrating the different networks, I suspect). In the past 24 hours, however, the telecoms regulator, OFTEL, has started to put pressure on BT to speed up the unbundling of the local loop, which could change things dramatically.

Anyway, the point being, the telecoms landscape in the UK makes it difficult to get high speed (and consumer level cost) internet access over fixed wire. Hence, options such as the service provided by tele2 are interesting. Or the grass roots consume.net, or others.

If BT was playing nicely, it wouldn't be necessary, but they may end up shooting themselves in the foot.

No complaints there.

...j

Here I go with a bit of karma-whoring (joke)

Go here to read about a loose coalition of london people trying to set up a similar scheme.

And go here to read all the comments from when this subject was last posted on /. just over a week ago.

You really need to check out consume.net

there are loopholes ie cb freq see www.consume.net for details!

Seeing as nobody seems to have mentioned it, there's a similar initiative being started by consume.net, aiming to do much the same thing around London in the UK. The first masts are going up at the moment, and apparently you can get quite a good range from the `Sarah Lee antenna', i.e. made out of a cake tin and coathangers :-) Maybe somebody who's actually used one can fill me in here, but the mention of it on the mailing list made me laugh.

Have a look at consume.net for a similar project that's underway in London, the difference being that it's being designed as a bandwidth sharing scheme so that packets from wireless devices can be forwarded to the general Internet using routers attached to ubiquitous wireless basestations.

It's underway in London already - by being a non-profit, loose organisation of volunteers just donating spare bandwidth and putting kit together to blanket as much of the public area as possible with 802.11.

It's interesting, to say the least.

See the consume.net site for more info. If it works, this might be a good model for replicating across other cities.

-- Yoz