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."

Comments

From the owner of the First Node of NYC wireless

[sportal]

I put of the first NYCwireless node 3 1/2 months ago (after seeing the article about Seattle Wireless here) so I thought I would respond to some of the valid the comments.

* 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

This can happen by accident

[PsyQ]

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.

Re:What I'm wondering....

[stripes]

And mind you, this is all coming from his own peronsal line. I don't know many people who would just go ahead and give away bandwidth to anyone for the hell of it. Regardless, for this kind of thing to happen everywhere would constitute either a huge non-profit organization with lots of funds, or government sponsoring...

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...

public water fountains

[circletimessquare]

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?