Slashdot Mirror

On the community side of things people did the same thing and created their own networks which still thrive today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One of the most successfully is Air-Stream Wireless Inc. in Adelaide, South Australia.
Back then (2001) dialup was common and DSL was expensive or not available. People take it into their own hands and created their own fast 24/7 netoworks. As the community grew these smaller groups joined an incorporated association which mainly helps with legal stuff and insurance. It also keeps the network afloat.

Now VPNs over the world wide web are linking other community networks such as WACAN in Western Australia and Melbourne Wireless in Victoria. Thanks to initial planning by Sydney Wireless early on each region has an allocated IP address space. http://www.sydneywireless.com/...

Now with spying and data retention by governments these networks have become extremely valuable.

Go and find a network near you or create your own!

...it provides heaps of motivation for
C
O
M
M
U
N
I
T
Y
Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.

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

It will be interesting whether community networks such as Sydney Wireless and air.net.au will prevail over this company. One oft-neglected point in favour of local networks is that all of the traffic stays in the geographic region. Most of Australia's horrific net access costs are due to the fact that most data accessed by Australians is served from the US backbone, which costs money (there are no reciprocal bandwidth agreements with the US providers). With very limited access to the greater Internet, a local wireless network will still be able to host local sites, allow P2P and allow many local game servers with no per-MB costs.

That's a very attractive option in a country where broadband is download-capped.

Damn it! I'm sooo sick of people WHINING here on slashdot. Oh, wait. Slashdot. If you don't like their policies, DON'T USE THEIR SERVICE. If you live in a metro area, go find some high speed hookup, get 10, 20, or 50 guys together in a close area, and set up your own high-speed network. We did this when I was going through university and it worked great. I live in a rural area, and the only way I'll ever see broadband again is if I take it upon myself to fix the situtation. Let's see here - 30 guys paying in $50/mo gives you $1500/mo to buy a pipe from or maintain leases on equipment. Do you have twenty people in networking range? How much bandwidth would that get? Could you get more than 30? Who would pay more? How important is your suckage in the long term? Would getting a fat pipe to someone's house, remotely dling your pr0n^h^h^heducational videos via a slower connection, and doing SneakerNet runs suffice?

I thought that america was the land of the "can do" attitude, not the bend-over-and-take-it capital of the world. (and whine about it). Look at what the auzzies are doing to combat the horrible internet and communications rates over there - projects like Sydney Wireless and others in europe have gone so far as to start laying their own cable. Get out and talk to your neighbours, take the initiative.

It could very well be that the current model doesn't work, because that 1% of users is exceeding the cable companies cost. It could be that you don't even need that much internet connectivity if you establish a well-stocked neighbourhood peer-to-peer net. I know another solution some of the residence dwellers use here is their own 802.11 network that isn't routed onto the campus network, or campus-owned.

If you don't have time, then accept the services offered at the market rate.

Man, I'm in a bad mood this morning. No coffee. But if I see another one of these whining threads, I'm going to scream! Might as well post a anti-MPAA diatribe, follow it up with a spiderman-II article.

I'm not sure why you think there needs to be a government mandated control of such a network. The whole point of the ISM band is that it's unregulated - but I'm pretty sure that the powers that be didn't expect 802.11 technology to be quite so sucessful. 802.11 is designed to be highly tolerant of noise, and I suspect the density can get quite high, either as it is now, or with a derivative technology.

How about another model? One were everyone, or a larger percentage of the community all get a commodity wireless access point and join up in a management framework, basically managed chaos, like the Sydney Wireless. I have a couple links on my community wireless page, too. With enough network overlap, you'd have pretty good coverage - maybe better than standard cell links. The bandwidth on these technologies is quite high, and 11mbit may only be the starting point.

But oh, what a world it might be if control of the communications medium - or, perhaps better phrased, control of A communications medium - went truely into the hands of the masses. I already know of two college campuses where students are running their own dorm networks to combat draconian policies on file sharing and gaming using 802.11. What if that ramped up to city wide? What if people start setting up their own WANs, and leasing their own fiber backbones? Or hell, even running their own fiber backbones, like has been done in Sweden?

Remeber BBSes? There was no tradegy of the commons there, and those formed pretty sophisticated networks towards the end. And no doubt caused a few LEOs to have kittens then..

Perth: http://www.e3.com.au
Sydney: http://www.sydneywireless.com
Melbourne: http://www.x.net.au

In fact, if I could be bothered I'd post a link for multiple community wireless networks in all the major cities in Orstraya.

I think e3 has lists of all the Aussie sites anyway.

Knock yourself out.