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Building A Community Wireless Network From Scratch
adelayde writes "This summer I've been involved in a project to build a community-orientated wireless network in the city of Bristol, England. Recently I published an article ( mirrored here and here) describing what we have achieved so far, including some interesting thoughts on passive repeaters. There is a supporting site (mirrored here) with detailed instructions on how to build antennae, and the main project web site is also available here. A bit of own trumpet blowing perhaps, but I think it'll be of interest to those readers involved in similar projects and be of some help to those thinking of starting their own."
Similar projects for Seattle, Washington and Sonoma County, California can be found here and here, respectively.
-Kaos
I would love to see more of these sites stress the importance of securing therse type of networks. All-in-all a good read.
I was working on a similiar project this summer as well. We have a grant from the state and community support to follow through, if someone is really interested they could read up on the grant at the link above.
These guys are way ahead of us, but if you are in the Reno area, or want to contribute ideas toward how we can setup a community wireless area here, please join our list and help contribute ideas! So far we have a couple people from Seattle and what not.
Personally, I think it would be uber cool to have someone setup a national (or International) wireless users consortum to organise all the great ideas people are coming up with. Non-commerial and commercial ideas a like.
A similar project for the Portland, OR Metro Area is located here.
My personal node (via nodedb) is here.
Join us.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Lots of articles appear on slashdot about ISPs monitoring communications for the government, shutting sites down without authorization or anything resembling due process (important if you are a US citizen!), operating system and software vendors restricting freedoms, abuses of media by government PsyOps (ack!) organizations, media conglomerates manipulating editorials, ad nauseum.
While all of that may or may not be true, there is now a technology that can greatly reduce the reliance of the technically inclined and general populace alike on these large, controlled networks. This is the first time in history that a viable, high bandwidth technology can be bought into for a hundred bucks and some clever thought. The signifigance of that is not immediately apparent now, but I suspect it will become VERY important in the years to come.
If you really care about getting shafted by your ISP and care about free speech this is a avenue to pursue in addition to your standard channels of protest. Set up local networks! Once upon a time, we did this with modems, call forwarding lines, and crummy XTs. A bunch of kids trading software provoked national secret service investigations. Not with the internet, but with long distance phone calls. 802.11 is making being a ham radio operator interesting again - I can play with antennas and build networks on the cheap! At 11mbits to boot! When I was in high school, I thought the kenwood handheld and a battery operated packet modem was pretty pimp - and it cost me a lot more than a d-link pcmcia card!
If you live in a high density area, look at getting together a co-op for bandwidth. Distribute it on WiFi. Get people together and pool some cash. The networks are there, and once they're built, they only have to be connected. There is no reason that in 5 years, there can't be an alternative to commercial ISPs for bandwidth. Just as nobody thought the internet would work (what! no circuits! no central provide!), there is no evidence a widely distributed decentralized wireless network won't, either.
Security is a non starter. Make the network all-encompassing and encrypt your traffic.
Combine the technologies with something like Freenet (freenetproject.org), and you have a real motivator for social change (like it or not). Run more static nodes!
My $0.02. 802.11 isn't hyped enough.
..don't panic
I would be interested in resources for both the technical how-to's and the political how-to's to accomplish a community LAN.
I have always wanted to start one in my area. If it's strait forward enough I could start one block at a time and maybe make a big hit.
Has anyone delt with the compitition? I would assume the Cable and DSL companies would be kinda pissed seeing everyone's money go to a wireless ISP with a T3 not through their wired lines. And since they have the bigger bank it means the little guys (dispite their good intentions) can get hurt real bad in battle.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
> SELECT * FROM brain_cells WHERE synaptic_rate > 0
0 row returned
Really nothing to do about wireless networks, but more about this submitted article.
:-) Well there is the bandwidth bill I suppose. hehe
If you are submitting your own site to slashdot, this is how you should do it! Have a couple mirrors handy so we can actually take a look at what you posted.
Kudos to this guy! There really should be some kinda of prize.
While I think that creating more local nets like we see here is great, it will take much more than a project like this to get rid of the "Oppressive ISPs."
The community in the article is still getting net access through a DSL modem, so they are still beholden to the Telco powers-that-be. If enough communities were to start up projects like this, and link together using their own methods, then a new form of Internet could take shape independent of the Telcos.
Imagine a mesh network on a national or international scale created from local nets and linked through purely public lines. Either that, or enough such networks sharing a few high-bandwidth connections along with freenet and tunnelling to make any monitoring and censorship pointless. The ISP's would have to adapt if enough communities simply shared one connection. The one's that refuse to move away from "one person/household == one account" will hopefully wither away.
As much as the Internet has become a big part of the way we live, we must take a greater part in shaping the way it develops if we want to retain the freedom we have with it, or to gain back the freedom we had before the Internet was declared a different arena from any other global communication tool (See DMCA, COPA, the recent decree from Panama etc for examples of this problem).
I know this has been mentioned in another post, but apropros of this article, the Waterloo Wireless group is (or was, I haven't heard from them in some time) trying for complete world domination at 11Mbit/sec.
I personally think that Tim Horton's (for those of you who need a reference, Timmies is like Krispy Kreme without all the ambience) should go all Starbuck's on us and implement wireless access points in their coffee shops. Well, at least around the University of Waterloo, anyway.
-- clvrmnky
As a cheaper alternative, why provide any direct bandwidth to the Internet? Use spare older boxes and set-up local news, email and web servers -- almost stepping back to UUCP days. It's a little hard for The Man to control your connection when you hardly have one, except for news and email feed. The local community web sites might not be too great, but they'd be in the community, which could be a plus.
Anyone who wanted could toss spare boxes onto your community intranet. Games servers, web sites, local small business -- And all without worrying about the pipe bill.
And clusters of community intranets could peer with each other. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Dropping it on an existing home-use DSL will cause .. trouble. If it doesn't violate the AUP, it will soon, and since the usage curve of a community WAN should be easy to detect.. (Sympatico has imposed a monthly transfer cap with extra charges past the cap.)
Alternately, a group could pool/raise the money for a legit connection, but then you're talking about money and organization. More power to those with the time for it.
One obsolete model was that of a lone operator setting up their own system and paying the costs out of pocket: The BBS.
I ran a BBS (Coherent/Linux based) for a decade until the Internet killed BBSs. (In the end, I tried a web-based BBS, still through my two phone lines. Couldn't afford that and a pipe out to the Internet, it died.) The main kicker was always the phone lines. I could have supported a large number of users even on a 486, but I couldn't justify the cost of the phone lines.
Now WiFi might make that model viable again. (After all, other than the cost of equipment, it's free.) WiFi doesn't have the coverage of the local telephone, but the number of "lines" are rather large.
I'm not talking about ye olde text BBS here, of course. Times have changed as have user expectations. I just think there might once again be room for a one-person cheep operation. What it would have to offer to make it attactive to users, I leave as an exercise...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Being from Bristol (UK), an early wireless adopter and a computing student, this article was very interesting.
:-)
However, I'm going to be very cynical and say that I don't see the point. What you have effectively done is split a product that costs >=£100 per month (2Mb ADSL) between 4 people. Individually it would cost those 4 people £20 each (512k ADSL for £19.99 per month).
While I think the project is a great excuse for the use of interesting technology, on such a small scale it's ultimately pointless.
The current aim of the project is feeble: "the aim was to prove that a portion of this connection could be successfully shared between a number of local residents or community groups by using wireless technology". Well, I could have saved you a lot of time and effort and told you it was possible
To make the project of any use (imho), it either needs to be far more widespread than it is (as you suggest, explore into other parts of Bristol), and approach Bristol City Council directly for funding/support, or there needs to be some benefit for those using it on a small scale, that there otherwise could not be. Simply giving 4 users ~512Kb/sec each isn't much benefit.
I'm pretty sure this might get moderated as a troll (if moderated at all) but that isn't the intention. Coming from where the article is based, it's hard not to get personal about the details - and although this project has a lot of potential, it seems to be in a very unevolved state.
Jonathan Love
At my uni the Wireless Communications Club (previously the Radio Hams - obviously not fashionable enough any more ; ) are working to extend the ComSci departments wireless LAN using repeaters in student houses. If you live along the right roads, you can get T3 access straight onto JANET. And without all of that ISP crap.
And we all know the sysadmins, so we can get away with all kinds of shit : D
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65