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A Motley Crew Beams No-Cost Broadband In New York
Peter Meyers points to this article in the Village Voice, one of the best I've seen on the growing guerilla-networking scene. He excerpts a bit for your pleasure: "Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost. Call it a marriage of the Web and pirate radio, forged even as big telecom interests bicker over the rights to wireless-spectrum licenses."
* As far as violating the terms of service, most of the internet connections we are using we are ok, since we are not reselling the service, only sharing it to the our immediate friends and neighbors. Providers may choose to change there terms of services though. We are paying for this service, and choosing to let people use bandwidth we have already bought.
* As far as the network getting used by to many users and becoming useless. Most of the access points have Linux or FreeBSD machines as gateways. If this becomes an issue we will just install traffic shaping software on the gateway. The goal is not to provide you with a superfast connection that will make you give up your home cable modem and DSL line to sit in the park (though that would be nice). The goal is to provide a public free open wireless network for anyone to use. Even if the network gets saturated and we are only providing each person with 10kBytes/sec, that is still double the speed of dialup and adequate for web browsing and email. I watch the bandwidth usage very carefully, and people have been very good about using the free network.
* Wireless is not a replacement for a wired network, and free networks are not a replacement for commercial networks. That being said we are never going to replace commercial wired networks. We can provide an alternative for you to use though.
If your interested in starting a project in your area, do it.
1. Put up a simple web page on geocities or something.
2. Start a mailing list on Yahoo Groups
3. Post links to your website on the Seattle Wireless and Personal Telco web pages. -That is how NYCwireless (originally RooftopsNYC) got started.
-Maybe there is a group in your area, check: Personal Telco Wireless Communties List
If your in New York City, your welcome to use my node at 84th Street and Lexington Ave. Relax at the corner, or have a coffee at the coffee shop.
www.nycwireless.net
Spectrum rights aren't an issue: 2.4 GHz (along with a couple other bands) are free and unlicensed subject to specific regulations (FCC Part 15) about the kinds of devices and their power output and signal type,
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Mile High Wireless is still a very TINY group, but we need people in Denver and Colorado Springs. We'll shoot for the entire Front Range, one community at a time. :)
http://www.milehighwireless.net
Drop me an e-mail specifically if you have any questions. :) numbski@hksilver.net_spam_suxx
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
A recent test in Zurich showed that as long as you have a notebook with a 802.11b wireless Ethernet card, you can freely use someone else's high speed Net connections as long as your battery lasts.
:)
In about 2 hours of driving through central Zurich, the testers found no less than a dozen open, unrestricted corporate wireless LANs. Getting the gateway's IP was not a problem thanks to most 802.11b base station's built in DHCP server. If you live near any of these companies, all you need is an external antenna for your card and off you go at someone else's cost - and it's their own fault.
But what's even greater is that around Lake Zurich, you can use broadband 802.11b for free, legally
See the project's official site.
It seems that nobody has mentioned the group's website at http://nycwireless.net/.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
There is a mailinglist that is based in sweden called Elektrosmog that has been discussing the technology and communities like this for quite a while now. We are also building a wireless community network in my small hometown Nora and the interest seems to be growing all the time.
At least under some OSes you can use something like ipfw's queue command to put all of the WiFi traffic on a lower priority queue so it will only use the bandwidth you are not using. For that to be most effective you need to set that at the far end of the connection as well, but even if you don't you can kludge it by feeding all incoming traffic through a dummynet pipe with slightly less bandwidth then the real thing and again favoring the non WiFi traffic. That will get TCP (and TCP like things) enough drops to back off.
Using different priority queues is nice because the full bandwidth (or very close to it) will be available for WiFi when you aren't using the link yourself. If your OS doesn't support priority traffic queues you may be able to use fixed size traffic shaping.
This of corse does raise the fixed cost a little, unless you are already doing NATing and the NAT box can do your traffic shaping.
I would rather avoid the government sponsoring since it will either take spending from things that deserve it more, or raise taxes (or both). Plus whenever the government sponsors something it thinks it has the right or even responsibility to regulate it...
i'm worried about this phenomenon being snuffed out... there are so many angles to how it could be killed: spectrum rights, terms-of-use, 802.11 security...
i live in manhattan... does anybody want to get together with me and try to propose to city hall that these entities should be legally protected? do it fast and stealthily enough, with the right level of positive community mojo, and it could sneak under the radar of the huge corporations with vested interests and reversing it would only be a pr embarassment for them...
people have water at home, sometimes metered, they buy bottled water, but everyone is used to the idea of the free public water fountain. why should it be any different with these little cells?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are motley crews beaming no-cost broadband in several dozen cities around the world. Unless they've managed to slather the entire Lower East Side with access points and get a fair number of end-user type participants, what the hell is so special about New York's version of this idea?
I'm doing this in Chicago (things are moving slowly). My personal favorites in the community wireless world are Seattle Wireless and Green Bay Professional Packet Radio (GBPPR has some great tech and a very experimental bent, but they won't give you the time of day unless you can convert mw to dBm in your head... fine with me).
The way DSL is going, I can't wait for stuff like this to pick up some momentum.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
It already happened. My @Home agreement says "Customer shall not... connect the cable modem to any computer outside of the Customer's premises."
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright