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Want communications without data retention? Join a community network like the wireless groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Air-Stream in South Australia http://air-stream.org/
WACAN in Western Australia http://www.wacan.asn.au/
Melbourne Wireless in Victoria http://melbourne.wireless.org....
Canberra Wireless http://www.cwn.net.au/

If there isn't one near you start your own and put up an access point for others to see.

Community wireless networks around the world continue to spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One very successful one is in Adelaide, South Australia http://www.air-stream.org/ which peers with VPNs over the world wide web with Perth's WACAN http://www.wacan.asn.au/ and Victoria's Melbourne Wireless http://melbourne.wireless.org.....

Source: I am a Australian.

Melbourne Australia currently has a network that covers a surprisingly large area and we keep adding nodes. I run one of the fiber connected backbone nodes where we have access to the local peering exchange.

We are even linking to other free wireless networks via tunnels as well so our network now reaches all the way to Adelaide. We are looking to connect to other networks so if anyone wants to link to our network, get in touch with me.

Better firmware is only part of the problem.

As a member of Melbourne Wireless where we have lots of cheap wireless routers, I can say the best consistent brand of low end routers is ASUS. I expect they are the OEM for many of the early versions of other routers as well based on looking at the insides.

Let's see what else operates at 2.4GHz... oh, Bluetooth and microwave ovens. How about the concerned parents turf their microwave ovens? See the bottom of this for simple measurements I have made of spectral power in the 2.4GHz band.

I would say that for every GS I buy for my hacking use, a friend or two will buy one that will always run the defualt firmware. I've found that if I'm doing free tech support that they better buy the exact model I ask them to get because I'm not going to be dealing with lots of different types of hardware for no reason. There are a few people who just don't understand this (Hi Dad!) and get the lowest priced stuff and I refuse to fix it.

I think Linksys has dropped the ball with the L model. They need more ram and maybe more flash. Things are getting tight as it is and my systems in the field running openwrt do run out of ram from time to time.
As someone involved with the Melbourne Wireless Router Project I am recommending people not buy any Linksys routers at this time. We have been attempting to locate other routers (such as ASUS) that I feel will be better in the long run but so far I've had poor luck being able to find something that can be had a reasonable retail price.

What we do with these units is to use custom firmware distro based on OpenWRT for our community wireless network. These units act as a captive portal, and when you login with your username and password, you get a defined level of access with that system.

It's all part of the Melbourne Wireless Router Project (MWRP) and is detailed more at:
http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/wiki/?MelbWireles sRouterProject

We currently use it in a number of places, and it can be used in both PC based systems, and the WRT54G APs. This is a great move for us by Linksys.

Australia
Brismesh (state)
Local

A digital terrain model is used to see what nodes are within line of sight in the Node Database

We're experimenting with intercity connects as well, ofther with the helpl of RF/amaterur radio experts.

Melbourne wireless is a group of people building their own network. Its not connected to the net mostly because the local telco charges per megabyte and all the other tier two providers (who claim their tier 1) bill the same way so the net is too expensive to give away connections....

Except.... the local telcos have annoyed me a great deal. I'm tired of seeing bills in the thousands of dollars a month for work's pathetic connection which does a less than a hundred gig a month. So I called up every local provder through their offices in the US and got price quotes there for service here. I've now got a spare bandwidth on an unlimited pricing plan. So lets see here, I'm mad the local telco, I've got roof space on the 129th tallest building in the world as well as a few other choice spots, I've got a few nice 120 degree max-rad antennas, I've got spare bandwidth that won't cost me anything if I give it away and a service contract that lets me resell or share it. I wonder what I should do.

Actually the source for this ap is extremely usefull..

For people building wide area networks like melbourne wireless

For the record there are extremely significant changes between the kernel source for this chipset and the standard 2.4.18 source in particular it's a MIPS r3k LX cpu which linux dropped support for during the 2.2 series because of a lack of hardware in circulation

With this source we can do all sorts of interesting things like put dynamic routing protocols on the device or turn them into ethernet attached wireless interfaces or any of lots of things.

Minitar Have been extremely helpful going to realtek multiple times on behalf of those requesting source..

• 200mhz MIPS r3k
• 2meg of flash rom
• 8meg of ram
• 2.4.18
• Busybox

Minitar's forums have a bunch of usefull information. The Melbourne wireless wiki has a bunch of info about it. including boot logs and diagrams for building the serial cable.

I recently moved into a house with an odd design which made connecting remote computers to the central router difficult using wires. My (iBook) laptop had no problems because it was able to go wireless, so I decided to go with a wireless solution for my Linux desktop. I had no idea what I was getting into.

I figured the easiest solution would be a USB based device, so I looked around and found a table of USB 802.11b driver support under Linux. At first, I went to a local store and bought a device that the table said was supported. I got it home and ugh, it barely worked. Under Linux the driver was awful. To see if it was maybe the card itself I tried it under Windows. It barely worked there, hanging the machine when I tried a throughput test.

So I sent that back and ordered an SMC card which was supposed to have vendor-supplied drivers. I got it home, plugged it in, and tried to install the drivers. No luck. It turns out they were binary-only drivers for specific old RedHat kernels. So I emailed SMC for support. A week later someone got back to me to say that my issue had been escalated. A week after that I got a tar file in the mail. It turns out what I received was simply a forked and slightly modified version of the code on a Sourceforge project. But, surprise, surprise, it didn't work either.

More investigations led me to an alternate driver. Using the mailing list associated with this project, thanks to Joerg Albert I was able to determine that my device has a hardware configuration which is apparently very rare and needs special firmware. Once I got that, after about 3 weeks of effort, I had working 802.11b access under Linux.

At the end of this I'm annoyed with SMC. I am glad that they acknowledge that Linux exists, on the other hand, they were completely useless when it came to actually supporting their product.

In the end I guess I voted well with my dollars, supporting a company that provided minimal efforts to support Linux rather than one that refuses to even admit it exists. But I also provided $$ to a company that is deceptive about their hardware being truly supported under Linux. It was also pretty annoying that to get the thing to work required taking some random firmware file (in the form of a C header file with a massive data array) and randomly trying it to see if it would work.

It's sad when voting with your dollars is like other kinds of voting, where you vote against somebody because they're worse than the person you're voting for.

What's more frightening is that in a month or so I'm scheduled to find a way to get a mini-PCI 802.11b card working for an embedded Linux system running on an ARM processor. If getting a system with a fairly standard connector was this difficult on a desktop machine, I'm dreading trying to get a card with an obscure interface working on non-i386 CPU. Wish me luck.

Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.

Yeah, Melbourne wireless has had quite a few new links come on in the last little while (there is now someone within 2km of me) but it is still no use if you want internet access.

...it provides heaps of motivation for
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Wireless Networks. And the government finds it pretty difficult to argue against them.

I just took apart my Mac LC & LCII. The both had AMD chips in them, not the processor, but some other chip was labeled with an AMD logo on it.

Also, for more WiFi info, these are some good links...

http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/wiki/?Apple

http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/WirelessLin ks

http://www.gulker.com/2002/10/10.html

I believe that most wireless access points are just PCMCIA wireless cards with some extra software and hardware controlling it, that's why prices of these are coming down so much.

Also see Seattle wireless which is a project that aims to do the same sort of thing.

You'll find that in a lot of places you won't legally be allowed to get internet access from nets sush as these because that would mean you become a internet provider, and there are legal ramifications of this. But as for sharing files and other applications, its quite useful.

cheers

To cut a long story short, the group wrote a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on broadband technologies, and then spoke to that submission. The politicians (from both major parties) asked reasonable questions, and once they got their answers their comments were highly positive, saying that they believed what the group is doing was legal, and they would support continued free access to the requisite spectrum.

Now, I'm not saying that all the group's potential legal pitfalls were solved with one enquiry submission, but the basic point is that politicians will listen, if you talk to them the right way.

I must say I've not been impressed with the Consume effort - or, rather, with their web-presence. http://www.consume.net looks messy, and whilst the use of Wiki is a good idea for discussion, the people over at Melbourne Wireless look a LOT more professional.

It doesn't make me want to connect my WLAN to what they're doing, at least at the moment. I'm keeping an eye on things.

Matt

For Melbourne users, there is a group called Melbourne Digital and Wireless who are dedicated to building a community wireless network. Other states have the same (there are links on that page).

There is the Planet Mirror archive and the AARNet mirror site, which are both located on the AARNnet not-for-profit network, which is currently operated by Optus backbone-wise. It would be a good idea if we had unmetered traffic to these sites. Telstra may win me as a customer based on their mirror archive on GameArena.

Melbourne's *community* network is http://wireless.org.au and a full list of global community networks is at http://wirelessanarchy.com