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

A better place to start

[Anonymous Coward]

is at wirelessanarchy.com

Re:Community wireless will never succeed

[voltaire]

As the link says check out NoCat. It provides a captive portal system that can implement both access control _and_ bandwidth limiting on the Linux 2.4 kernel. Additionaly there are some people interested in developing micropayment systems.

Then you have groups like SeattleWireless that aren't focusing on internet access but instead on local access to a MAN with the ability for internet gateways for those that do want out, or you simply connect back to your private node and use your own internet gateway.

Re:Community wireless will never succeed

[Wonderkid]

I disagree. 1) The main threat to 802.11 will be 3G (and 4G) once they arrive, just as the mobile phone has pretty much killed off most public phones. 2) Where I believe there is a market, until 3 & 4G mature, is in coffee shops. Yes, I know they already exist in techie communities, but I have spent whole days in coffee shops in San Francisco, and paid for several coffees, sandwiches and cookies. If more people visit such places because they want to work away from their office or home office, it will bring in business for the coffee shops and cover their DSL line that's wired to the 802.11 base station, such as Apple Airport or other. This could open up markets anywhere there are a lot of business people, not just techies. And even if people do not want to buy a coffee or cookie, as per...

ZA Spot Restaurant
371 11th St. (between Harrison & Folsom)
SF, CA 94103
USA

(Formerly the Red Roaster Room at another location in San Francisco)

...customers can always pay a few dollars just to sit down on sofa with laptop and warm the knees.

Whatever, wireless will be THE largest industry this planet has ever known 3-4 years from now. Bigger than cocain and the auto industry put together. (Unless of course it is proven beyond a doubt that we're all having our DNA scrambled by anything from Bluetooth to Ultra Wide Band and everything in between.) Now that would be a major bummer!

Some other networks/wireless networking sites

[Forrestina]

http://awip.truffula.net
http://austinwireless.net
http://www.milehighwi reless.net
http://free2air.org
http://consume.ne t
http://bcwireless.net
http://www.bawug.org
ht tp://www.houstonwireless.org
http://nycwireless.n et

Why so hung up about control?

[xtal]

I'm not sure why you think there needs to be a government mandated control of such a network. The whole point of the ISM band is that it's unregulated - but I'm pretty sure that the powers that be didn't expect 802.11 technology to be quite so sucessful. 802.11 is designed to be highly tolerant of noise, and I suspect the density can get quite high, either as it is now, or with a derivative technology.

How about another model? One were everyone, or a larger percentage of the community all get a commodity wireless access point and join up in a management framework, basically managed chaos, like the Sydney Wireless. I have a couple links on my community wireless page, too. With enough network overlap, you'd have pretty good coverage - maybe better than standard cell links. The bandwidth on these technologies is quite high, and 11mbit may only be the starting point.

But oh, what a world it might be if control of the communications medium - or, perhaps better phrased, control of A communications medium - went truely into the hands of the masses. I already know of two college campuses where students are running their own dorm networks to combat draconian policies on file sharing and gaming using 802.11. What if that ramped up to city wide? What if people start setting up their own WANs, and leasing their own fiber backbones? Or hell, even running their own fiber backbones, like has been done in Sweden?

Remeber BBSes? There was no tradegy of the commons there, and those formed pretty sophisticated networks towards the end. And no doubt caused a few LEOs to have kittens then..