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A decentralized wireless mesh network like Portland's PTPnet would be just the thing for this. Of course, amateur radio enthusiasts live for times like this, have the tools, and are usually pretty organized.
http://www.personaltelco.net/WikiTour#The_Network

Of course you can't make money this way, that was clear to many people years ago. Earthlink just wasn't paying attention.

If you want to know why, just look at the work of groups like Personal Telco Projectin Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.

The city of Portland asked for proposals for a municipally-backed Wi-Fi network that would cover the whole city. The winning bid was an outfit out of California called MetroFi. The city of Portland paid ZERO money up front. They simply offered up city property (light poles, mostly,) to mount the access points, and said that they would run some coverage tests as the project proceeded. If the project met their standards, then the city government would purchase 'preferred' access on the network, while the company offers free access to anyone.

The service isn't perfect, but they do have decent coverage in the neighborhoods it is installed in so far. The big problem with the grass roots effort is lack of coverage in residential areas. Yeah, you have the occasional maverick (like myself,) who has a home router set up as a true open/public AP, but other than that, it's usually piggybacking off people who unknowingly have open APs. This "private/public" network is at least KNOWN free access. My only two complaints are that as part of their contract with the city, they are allowed to show ads (a top-frame above all pages you view, plus an occasional interstitial, although both are possible to block without much difficulty,) and that the APs are just slightly too far apart for notebook use in a car. With a decent external antenna, it's easy to get a good signal anywhere within the 'coverage cloud', but a stock notebook has problems connecting at the lull areas between APs. (Even more annoying are times when my notebook sees 4 APs, but won't connect to any of them because they are all too weak.)

The people doing roofnet have mostly suspended development on the project to form Meraki. Unfortunately, the ties to proprietary technology that Meraki is using makes it less interesting. However, there are projects such as OpenWrt used by community groups like Seattle Wireless (http://www.seattlewireless.net/), Personal Telco in Portland (http://www.personaltelco.net/) and Buffalo Wireless (http://www.buffalowireless.org/). These projects are using things like OLSR (http://www.olsr.org/) in order to create a mesh network on top of the OpenWrt linux distro. Perhaps these are some of the same technologies that the Harvard project is planning to use as well. It seems like it would be pretty easy to implement.

• Home of Intel
• Home of Hewlett-Packard
• Home of Tektronix, FLIR, Mentor Graphics
• Linus Trovalds moved to Portland from the SF Bay Area
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention
• Government Open Source Conference
• Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)
• Large free Wireless project Personal Telco
• New PSU Open Source lab
• 5th largest Craigslist community (2004)
• Corporate HQ of Lattice Semiconductor, RadiSys, Planar Systems
• Home of Sun Microsystems High-End Operations
• Yahoo!, FEI, Credence Systems, and TriQuint Semiconductor located here

This is a Bad Thing, as vendor lock-in always is. Because Microsoft is involved, I'm now fighting the plan and want to see the whole thing ripped out since it won't be run responsibly. Personal Telco got it right, they should be the ones to make wifi go wall to wall in Portland.

The Personal Telco Project also has a good list of prism 2 cards, which are well supported in Linux by several different drivers (orinoco, wvlan_cs, host_ap). HostAP allows you to use your computer as an access point, though 'till recently you had to compile it separately.

Portland is truly awesome. I had forgotten about the free wireless, and was flying through there for the first time and discovered it. It totally made my day.

Bonus: at this rate, not too long before the whole city has free wifi. w00t!

All Free Open Community Network Nodes..
All the Time

http://personaltelco.net/map/

Good Neighbors Share.

We here in Personal Telco Project ( http://www.personaltelco.net/ )country, that being Portland Oregon, have not seen this particular behavior go on. In fact we have seen the exact flip side in most of the cafes we help get nodes into.

There are several coffe houses who can point to the day the PTP node went in as the day thier revenues went up, noticably.

There are communities that can point to the day some one put up a neighborhood node to as the day folks started spreading the goodness.

We have found that when folks put up a Free Wifi Node and all that it can entail (not just internet access but community based local content (web, daap, zeroconf, ftp, distro repositories , etc etc) the community of users are enriched and the people hosting the node are not abused to the point of wanting to turn it off.

Maybe we are truly in the right place at the right time with the right mix of citizens, who are the riches of any city as b!x will tell you. Im not sure whats cooking up there in Seattle but i hope it gets better.

-tomhiggins
www.personaltelco.net

Portland, Oregon has been slowly working on a plan like this for awhile. Unfortunately, the process has proven to be just as slow as a company like Qwest.
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2004/1 2/13/focus3.html

At least we have the Personal Telco project:
http://www.personaltelco.net/static/index.html

I know I'm going to get some flames for this because quite a lot of Slashdotters seem to believe that everything should be free, but I'm not absolutely comfortable with free city-sponsored wireless.

Telecom companies rank just below HMOs on the vileness scale, but having Chicago put up wireless APs everywhere is not going to result in a socialist Internet dream where the city pays for your pr0n downloads. What it does result in is some lucky corporation's dream, where everyone in Chicago pays the city (some more indirectly than others) to pay a single contracted telecom to give them wireless Internet.

Not everyone is going to use this service. That's OK, not everyone uses the school system, but we all pay for it...but in this case, I'm not even sure that a clear majority in Chicago use the Internet. And even if they do, some use it much less than others. Most Slashdotters probably would have a hard time going back from their broadband accounts to $10/mo dialup, but the average person who checks their AOL email once a day is probably under no pressure to switch anytime soon.

Furthermore, due to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which I firmly believe in, I expect the city would end up having to do (or contract out) major security work to handle people with too much time on their hands. The issue of censorship comes up as well -- the city now acts as the ISP for a host of activities that may include breaking Illinois state law. This can probably be ironed out, but why deal with it at all?

As much as I love getting stuff free, I have to say that this screams "boondoggle". The potential waste and corruption (this is the Chicago city government we're talking about) of a deal like this, as well as the small number of potential beneficiaries, makes me very dubious.

What do I like better? Portland's Personal Telco Project. It's not sponsored by (read: under control of) the city government. It's done by private contributors who choose their own ISP, allowing a wider range of solutions to be chosen, are responsible for the cells of their own network, and -- apparently -- make group decisions by consensus as opposed to mandate (as the city would be the primary controller of a municipal network, I'm guessing most decisions would be by mandate of some controlling committee). There is also less potential for fuckwad-related damage, since the people who put these up generally are nerds or assisted by nerds who know what they're doing. In short, it's much more decentralized and, IMHO, essentially more free.

Of course, it's not as easy to get city-wide municipal Internet the Personal Telco way as it is to simply tell all your fellow citizens to pay for a luxury that you want.

This pending bill places some crippling roadblocks in the way of municipal broadband for Oregon. It would require municipalities to have a majority vote in a referendum before providing any such service and would subject the proposed municipal communications providers to open records and open meetings requirements that do not apply to private-sector providers.

Requirements like those are just the Oregon way. I've lived in many places, and Oregon by far has the most politically active citizenry. While on the surface such requirements may seem appealing in order to protect Oregonians, they might just be the sugar coating a poison pill for municipal wifi.

The bill also calls for a cost-benefit analysis to be done at the end of three years. Three years is a very short time to see a return on investment. And the process detailed by HB 2445 would need to be repeated for each municipality as the network expands. This sounds like a long and tedious process. By the time anything can be done, the technology to disseminate network connectivity will have changed multiple times.

Mike.
http://injoke.org

Personal Telco Project

This doesn't limit the rights of citizens to use technology. You can still use wifi at home and community based wifi initiatives like the Personal Telco Project in Portland Oregon are free to do as they wish. This bill is more about government competing with services that private business can and/or should provide. Remember the city was planning on charging for this service as well.

Now, wether broadband should be considered a needed municipal utility and/or something cities should even be involved in is another question.

Yes, take the Personal Telco approach.

Personal Telco Project is a Federal tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and an Oregon non-profit organization. We want to facilitate partnerships with local businesses, and in doing so permit the raising of funds though tax-deductible contributions.

It's called "NoCatAuth". Read more here or here.

Pro|Structure of Portland, OR has two guys that have got Linux running on, I believe, a Linksys WRT54G. NoCatAuth is included. Otherwise, if you feel slightly more adventureous, you can install Linux on an old laptop (I used an old P2 Compaq) with a wireless NIC and a wired connection and, viola (aka a lot of time and configuration later) you have wireless.

Anybody have any idea how incredibly hard it is to find a good outside location in the shade with both a Personal Telco node and a working electrical outlet? I have no idea how Pioneer Square hosts so many events when out of two dozen outlets I found, only one works, and it's located on the roof of the TriMet bunker on the side of the podium that overlooks the square, which also happens to double as a public restroom for the Californian rejects who end up homeless here.

Your rules in the UK must be more strict than ours in the US, we get to use 4 watts EIRP in the ISM band (more info).

-jim

That was PGE Park in Portland. It seems to be up and running, but I hadn't heard anything since the park got all snippy.

http://www.nodedb.com/unitedstates/or/portland/vie w.php?nodeid=512
http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/Node512

Isn't that essentially the same motivation that drives kernel hackers? Who don't really care about what computing gets done, just that it can be done on a kernel they built themselves...

Open source software is also an instrument of social change - improving the linux kernel empowers the masses in addition to having a direct effect on other people being able to get their work done. This is a significant motivating factor for a lot of people, and is one reason why Linux is popular and Minix is not.

Wireless networking is also an instrument of social change - it allows people to communicate directly with each other without having to rely on third party infrastructure. Unfortunately, ham radio has too many restrictions to enable this sort of social change, so it's happening in the unlicensed spectrum (see the personal telco project for one of many example).

-jim

The Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon, is setting up free internet access points all over town (mostly in coffee shops), and invites home users to open their networks up, as well. There was a writeup about it in the most recent Willamette Week (weekly alternative newspaper based in Portland).

We're having a naked midnight bike ride. When given the choice the Association of Brewers holds its annual conference here because the members consider Portland the best beer city in the US. local wireless group has hundreds of free hotspots scattered about. Highest per capita rates of bookstores, movies screens and coffee houses in the US. Snow only every other year at the most. Easy to get out into the countryside when you need to be away from urban living.

If you stop by Free Geek to donate spare parts or help, say hi and be nice to Laurel, the overworked geek goddess.

I didn't mention FG in my thread because I was writing to a tourist, originally. Another organization people moving to the Portland area should know about is the Personal Telco Project. I have to warn everyone once again about the Fry's in Wilsonville, also; their customer service was pretty sad and the manager unresponsive when I lived in the area.

Want to see what you can get from donations and volunteer efforts?

http://www.personaltelco.net

2.8 million would be nice to have, do not get me wrong. Given what we are doing for what we have it would mean a heck of a lot of coverage.

Current business models of non-free public hotspots assume that the HotSpot is operated by a Wireless Internet Service provider, with some kind of revenue sharing with the venue owner. In other words the business relationship is not between the end-user and the venue owner, but instead between the end-user and a third party (the WISP).

This business model is in strong contrast to other goods and services which are sold at the venue. At a hotel everything from breakfast to video on demand is sold directly from the hotel to the hotel guest. This gives the hotel a strong incentive to promote the products and make sure that the product works. With WiFi today most of the revenue goes to the WISP which also has the support obligation towards the end-user.

Wifi access needs to be sold directly by the venue owner to the end-user, and the venue owner also needs to be the primary responsible for the quality of the product.

Have a look at personal telco which has a great review of open source HotSpot software.

PersonalTelco has an excellen review on Open Source Wi-Fi software. Could be something for Nepal's farmers!

The absolute power limit is 1 watt for unlicensed 2.4 ghz equipment. The EIRP limit is 4 watts for point-to-multipoint, but can be higher for point-to-point. (Disclaimer: I'm not an RF engineer, so read the actual fcc regulations before you try it.)

more information

-jim

You can find transmit power / recieve sensitivity numbers for a lot of prism2 cards here. I suspect most of these numbers are gleaned from product brochures, so you mileage may vary.

-jim

IIRC, the maximum tx power in the 2.4ghz band for unlicensed users is 1 watt, or 4 watts EIRP. For point-to-point links, though, you can trade 1db of power reduction for 3 db of antenna gain, allowing much higher EIRP.

More info is here

-jim

Yes, like this: Linux Access Point

IMHO, PersonalTelco rocks.

Yes, like this: Linux Access Point

IMHO, PersonalTelco rocks.

The idea of line of sight doesn't need to go over amateur bands. In fact, doing so would be a bad idea for many reasons including transmission speed (9600?!?!?!) and the part 97 rules which don't allow for any kind of commercial activity.

However, there have been many such links done over long distances that used standard 802.11 gear and highly directional antennas. Here in NYC we've done many such links through the nycwireless project. A good source of info would be the Personal Telco site. Other projects to take a look at would be the 310km WiFi link at The Swedish Space Corporation, even though that's probably way over budget ;). See here for a slightly out of date (1998) mini how-to on a Linux wireless router for a 5 mile link. Also just try google for pertinent info. All of this is, of course, a moot point if you don't have line of sight to anything. What about a regular telephone line? Cell Phone?

Good luck with this, post back to let us know what you did and how it worked!
-Derek, KC2JKD

Setting up your own HotSpot is really not that hard. The PersonalTelco PortalSoftware page has a great review of Open Source Software for setting up your own HotSpot.

All you need to set up your own HotSpot is
* An Internet connection
* An old PC ($25 from a garage sale)
* An access point (Available from $100)


The users database can be stored in Radius, MySQL, PAM or LDAP.

Go check out Personal Telco and actually read their basic policies. There isn't very much you can do on a Personal Telco node- I run one out of my house (someday I'll get that old pizza dish hooked up so that I have Internet Access at the park across the street) and I have just about everything except for http blocked. Ted

There are services that cost money to provide that are given away and the cost recouped either indirectly or as a markup in the overl price of other goods and services being offered.

With Free Community Wireless Networking the cost of backhaul and Equipment to cover a small area (commercial frontage, public use space, dwelling) can often be either recovered by increased biz or absorbed as the cost of being a good neighbor.

Just as Movie Theaters saw dramtic increases in summer time viewers with the inclusion of Air Conditioning so too are some biz and public spaces finding an increase base of use withthe draw of Free Wireless.

Living in Portland OR and being a part of the Personal Telco Project I can say this as a proven fact and not simply as some slashrot debate point. The places where we have nodes are seeing marked increases in their customer base. Several places we have put nodes in have become social centers for nomad laptop workers.

The problem with the Fee plans are that they simply will not wake up to the fact that customers will not pay for something that will quickly be seen on par with Lighting, AC, a glass of water, background music and those cool drink umbrellas.

Wake up Biz People....The writting is not only on the wall its on your bottom line.

1) Educate folks to build free community wireless netowrks

2) Help them build it

3) Tie them togther

4) Enjoy

Personal Telco Project

"Making tomorrows today yesterday"

Of course, if you're following the rules at Personal Telco for a public AP, then at least you're not going to be sending spam out from your broadband connection.

I gather mobilemesh is not an ideal solution, but it is good enough for neighbourhood sized networks, until the state of the art advances, producing a better successor.

Personal Telco

Set up a thousand little 802.11 hotspots with point-to-point links to send all sorts of data across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics! Its already legal! The hardware is already cheap!

Now you've not only got local content streaming radio, you've got VoIP services, freely distributable media sharing, local news blogs, etc etc.

This is the dream of many wireless community networking groups, including The Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon, USA.

How long is it going to take before people realize that corporations creating "standards" is just their way of ensuring that people continue to buy their proprietary non-"open" products?

Sorry, I'll stick with my impossible-to-control-or-limit mp3 technology, thanks. I don't care if it has to be "licensed", mp3 codecs are downloadable and usable very easily with no technical limitations at all, and that's exactly what I've been doing for quite some time now.

If legal issues arise with the mp3 format I'll just use Ogg Vorbis.

Why waste my time dealing with DRM bullshit like corporate-controlled statistics and tracking, and even worse, waste CPU time encoding the extra data used to for all of that when ripping my CDs to disk?

Also, not being able to play a WMA file on my Mac because they don't make the newer Windows Media Player for older Mac OSes is just stupid. Microsoft's "standards" cut off previous systems and formats, and we all know it. Personally, if they're going to go so far as to use DRM-enabled BIOSes, I'll stick with my 1.5ghz system, regardless of how "fast" computers get. If I'm required to use a DRM-enabled system to get online, well, guess I'll have to resort to these.

Also, my household has numerous computers of varying platforms and OSes. I'm not going to segregate my network by eliminating the current interoperability I experience by using software that isn't crippled or even better, is designed to work with other software by default.

In the end, it's just marketing. MS doesn't care about our "security". It's to protect their profits and their stranglehold upon the IT scene... this is just blatantly obvious, and I'm disappointed that people don't see this.

A few final things to consider: in the end, who does this benefit? Do we really need DRM? Are you willing to make the privacy-related sacrifices neccesary to attain the benefits supposedly only attained through DRM?

Funny, but in my friend's case, quite true. The Personal Telco Project in Portland, OR runs several hundred nodes in the metro area. Perhaps 20-25 are high-profile nodes, in businesses.

However, many are in residential neighborhoods. My friend couldn't get DSL at his house, but four block away his PTP-friendly neighbor already had it. With the aid of a Linksys WET-11 and WAP-11 plus a bit of a boost to the WET-11's antenna (I think) via a half-moon reflector, he manages to get access to the internet - FOUR blocks away. 802.11b + good equipment = distance, baby.

Running a similar node in a secure (!) fashion is not necessarily that difficult. You can check out my notes on the node-on-a-laptop I did here: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/Node172

The area that I'm concerned about here: will this regulation retard development of free wireless services like The Personal Telco Project.

... here.

cheers- raga

A number of the independent coffee shops have set up free Wi-Fi access around here, either on their own or through our local community wireless project Personal Telco It appears to draw a fair number of users and thus more business for the shop.

One thing that I would recommend is setting up a click through usage agreement and blocking SMTP. Otherwise you're setting your self up for abuse by spammers and liable for the actions of other loser-users (blackhats, kiddie-porners, etc.).

I don't mean to come off as a racist or anything, but seriously. when you are in fact a terrorist, wouldn't it make sense to sharpen up a little, maybe try and cut down on the co-worker-thinks-im-a-terrorist-because-i-look-lik e-this factor?

Also remember Portland is one of the most un-wired cities around. Check out PersonalTelCo for info and hotspots.

Definately check out Powells as the parent post mentioned. But make sure you check Powell's Technical Bookstore located 8 blocks or so away. Computer stuff, math stuf, history of science stuff, just crazy fun nerdy stuff. Must see.

Take a look at Wacky Willys too. Just plain nerdy weird stuff. Like McGyver's play house.

Check out Hawthorne street for some good hostels and also interesting and typical portland life. Fun shops, good eats, interesting people.

And if you're here in the summer time, a little secret- the women around here are extremely easy to look at.

Above all, if you're backpacking around Oregon, welcome to one of the coolest outdoor states around. Take your pick, and within 2-3 hours (drive) you got mountains, ocean, forests, desert, and just some fun adventure potential.

And since I'm here, let me mention that if you're interested at all in white water kayaking, check out pdxkayaker.org. An incrediblely fun groups of alcoholics with a kayaking problem.

Jason

T-Mobile: These guys actually have a decent priced unlimited plan at $29.00 a month. BUT, it looks like their speeds are limited to around 56k. I'd really like more speed, but I suppose that's the trade off for the cheap price.

I've looked at T-Mobile myself. IIRC, that $30/month isn't an all-you-can-eat plan. And the additional bandwidth charges are pretty steep. It might be affordable for checking your email on the road, provided you configure your client not to download everything every time you check.

The right keyword for Googling cellular data service is GPRS. I personally consider GPRS to be the only cellular data technology worth paying attention to. Though maybe I'm just prejudiced against CDMA-based data services because U.S.-only wireless standards are a major pain.

If you must have a lot of bandwidth on the road, you should consider signing up with a Wireless Hotspot service. Then all you have to do is schlep your way to the nears Borders or Starbucks (neither is in the Gobi Desert yet, but I think they're working on it), plug in your WiFi card, and surf. Or you could just get the WiFi card and look for Free Hotspots or other open networks.