Mega Public WAN In Sydney

Chris Meder writes: "As posted on CFGN - The Nation , gibed by the recent unreasonable price hikes in Broadband connectivity in Australia, which come already after a strained relationship between Broadband users and the major telco/ISP Telstra BigPond Internet, a group of people in the largest Australian metropolitan city of Sydney have decided to form a city wide amateur wireless network. The team behind this clever idea have also put up a detailed graphical database of people interested and are still looking for more numbers to get this off the ground." This last part reminds me of the Global Access Wireless Database, as featured here. Update: 01/23 18:53 GMT by T : Reader Peter Mann wrote to point out that "there's a mailing list for a similar wireless project in Sydney at http://sydney.air.net.au."

Comments

cripes

[Frothy Walrus]

i read that as "Mega Public WANG" at first.

hey, it's the Australians. you just never know.

This isn't the first

[yobbo]

Melbourne has had it's own wireless network running, as have other cities in australia. Visit air.net.au for an idea of other projects which have been going for much longer.

Question on posibility of advanced networking

[chabotc]

What could you _realy_ do with a network like this? It seems obvious that a lot of nodes will go on / off, packets will get droped, and the optimal routes will be ever changing.

Would a good BGP routing setup deal with this? Preferable you would even setup multiple outbound gateways (thru ip-masq if need be for adsl/cable outbound routes)

Also a nice amount of squid clusters could realy help out here..

I think that if you would release a complete high-tech network design on this style of setup, you could truely create a decentralised, flexible and unstopable network.

Now imagine, if they would link up a lot of outgoing gateways (cable, adsl thru ip masq), and allow notebook users to link up @ any location in the city thats within the area covered.

Add to this some nice ftp mirrors, BBS style websites, and you would have a hackers dream ;-)

Re:who will be their provider?

[arsaspe]

Telstra isn't the only internet backbone provider in Australia... They are the largest, only because they are the dominant phone company.

There is also Optus, who provide excellent service and are slowly taking over Telstras business.
Ozemail/UUNet, sucky, overpriced, but still alive and kicking
Primus - Small, but I'm pretty sure they have there own link
There was also one.net, but it recently went broke

Cool, but be careful

[foo fighter]

I know this is an amature/not-for-profit project, and I am clueless about Australian law.

But, I'd highly suggest the core people responsible for the administration of this project incorporate and seek legal counsel. If you search around you could probably find a lawyer to help you pro bono. I definetely recommend this approach for everyone thinking about doing this sort of thing in the US (I know several articles discussing that very thing have been on Slashdot).

There are significant risks to these individuals, both from individuals utilizing this service, and from the upstream provider who probably isn't aware that its bandwidth is being shared by an entire metropolitan area. When a user is hacked, or the upstream provider finds out these people are breaking the TOS lawsuits will fly.

This is really cool, and I wish them all the best, just use common sense and get some legal advice.