Community Wireless Networks in the UK

Some random reader points us to this story about community wireless networking in the UK. Not really any new news, but maybe the publicity will get more people involved. As usual, if you want to set up your own node, you can start at Nocat or PersonalTelco.

Comments

Community wireless will never succeed

[atrowe]

The inherent flaw in the grassroots community wireless scheme is that current technology provides no way of identifying individual users and holding an individual liable for the bandwidth he or she consumes. A wireless access point is a one-time investment, and is relatively inexpensive, however bandwidth is not free. The lowest rates I've seen are in the range of 1-2 dollars per gigabyte, and these prices are usually only available in bulk to major datacenters and ISPs. These prices have remained stable for the past several years and show no indications of dropping any time soon. The average user is going to pay quite a bit more for bandwidth, and simply cannot afford to give this valuable commodity away without compensation.

Existing wireless networking protocols are inherently weak in that they do not have any built-in features which would support personal identification and authentication. This design flaw makes it hard, if not impossible for a hobbiest interested in providing a wireless access point to be compensated for the valuable services provided. I feel that it would be an invaluable service for the IEEE to imbed universally identifiable ID tags which could be tied to hardware similar to MAC addressing in ethernet networking products. This would allow do-it-yourself access providers as well as ISPs to track users and provide billing capability for wireless usage. Until this happens, free wireless networking simply cannot thrive in a Capitalist environment.