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This is not new, check out the original free community network.

Of course! They provide free wifi and a very relaxed terms of service!

Never mind anonymous proxies; consider the Linksys Community Network and Default Community Network. Fire a comment through an open AP in or around a major city and you've got damn good anonymity, assuming you personally haven't already been targeted.

Packetstream Gold is the name of the plan, it's all-you-can-eat for $45 on top of whatever voice plan you've got.

My speeds have been ~30kbps very consistently. Under poor signal conditions it occasionally drops to 25k or so, probably because of packet retries. The phone appears as a plain old modem plugged into the serial port, unless you get the USB version in which case you get to play driver-go-round until you get it working. Argh!

Once you're able to say AT and get an OK from the phone, a simple ATDTS=2 causes the phone to start a PPP session with you. It then chops the packets up and sends smaller ones over the air, which is optimal for an interface with high interference and loss. The equipment on the tower side requests retries of air packets, reconstructs your IP datagrams, and puts them onto the back-end WAN, where they ride to Texas for some serious NAT-fu.

The reason I got the serial cable in the first place was that the USB cable does not charge the phone from your laptop, so you're limited by the battery. Plus if I'm sitting still with the laptop and phone, I'd like to use the time to top off the battery anyway. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I've been trying to find a full-pinout cable that I can hack up and make my own usb data-and-charging cable.

The RS232 cable has a jack on the side, where your regular charger plugs in, and the power is then passed through to the phone. Plugging in the charger during a session doesn't interrupt your connection, but unplugging it does. This effectively prevents opportunistic charging, as it's a major inconvenience to reopen whatever connections I had, following a charger yank. (Or worse yet, using the car charger, the power hit from twisting the ignition switch back and forth is enough to kill the ppp session!) Nextel claims that this stupidity is behavior-as-designed, which I think is corporate speak for "we don't care, neither should you."

There's another issue that the phone seems to reset itself during intense upload activity. Forget throwing a few photos into my gallery while on the road! Upload half a meg and *beep* oh look, the phone's rebooting and I've been disconnected! At least FTP restart works sometimes. The rest of the time, there's Zmodem-resume. (Ironic that we'd revert to decades-old technology to overcome today's crap networks.)

I agree with krangomatik that Nextel's IP assignment bites the bag. There's a $20 setup charge for an IP when you get Packetstream, but I'm still behind their braindead NAT system. Where's my public address, guys? I think I'll raise some customer service hell this week. Going PASV for FTP uploads bites, especially if the server's behind a firewall and can't make outbound connections either!

All in all, it's fairly workable and worth the money. I'm still a customer after all. There are some stupid little issues that Nextel could work harder to resolve, though.

Ricochet sure would be nice, but it looks like Aerie's growth plan only includes the few markets where they think they can make a profit. That makes sense I guess, but what of all the equipment in the rest of the country? It's powerful DSP-based radio equipment with FPGA's for packet logic, the closest thing we've yet seen to software-defined radio, and it's all sitting there idle because nobody in the community knows how to program it.

For quick file transfers in urban areas, nothing beats the trusty old Pringles can, I've got to admit. If only deliberate hotspots were as common as accidental ones! Oh wait, they are.

Unless your definition of "community" is "Linksys."
Like the Linksys Communtiy network?

Why not refer to this site for more info?