Is virtual community's destiny to replace real life? I don't think so. But virtual communities can supplant the real world, if they can survive. I believe the ultimate failure of virtual communitites stem from two problems: the failure to get members to 'stick', and the inherant dangers of rampant liberty. The first, mobility of members, is something that has successfully been overcome by some communities with common interest (like a users group) and by others with content, commonality, and ease of use (like AOL). The problem of liberty however, is best demonstrated by the chaos of an unmoderated chat room. Another problem with liberty is that the powerful - and in a technilogical realm I believe power is directly related to ability - are able to impose their will upon the less powerful. Now, not all power is bad - the open source movement is a premier example of benevolant power - but there are those who seek to utilize their power to the detriment of the weak. That is the the reason for the need for some governance - to protect the weak from the wicked. Community rulership, in whatever for it takes, must have the power of banishment and exile - the virtual equivalent of death - as a method for dealing with the worst offences, things like cracking, fraud, activity that is related to capital crimes like cyber-stalking, information theft and offences of that nature which are wholly in opposition to the values of the community. Lesser offenses might include flaming, libel or slander, the results of stupidity or negligence such as security gaffs. These could be dealt with through a ranking and demerit system which has real consequences in terms of acccess, cost, benefits. In a virtual community, the desire of the members is to be included, by leveraging this desire into the 'criminal code' the community members are faced with the choice of inclusion or lawlessness. Once the ranking system is in place, part of the acent in power is the responsibility to govern within the community - observing and doing nothing when an offence takes place, such as a flame in a chatroom, could have a higher penalty than the flaming itself. The growth of the polity creates the need for bodies of rule and appeal, and these should be members who are held accountable for their own actions as well as how they govern.
The issue you seem to be focusing on is that one node can only support x number of clients and that these clients have to each have their own exclusive bandwidth to talk to the node. 802.11 clearly isn't suited for this kind of application, but there are ways to give a million users mobile, wireless access with throughput and speed of service sufficient to make the user happy. Commercial trunked radio gets around this problem, cramming thousands and thousands of handheld and vehicle radios into both the 400MHz and 800MHz broadcast spectrum by segmenting the spectrum into 25Mhz channels and assigning addresses to the clients and broadcasting packets in each channel, just like ethernet. These networks are distributed in peer to peer nets of nodes which act like cell phone cells. Every major metro has at least two of these networks up and running right now - one for taxis and delivery trucks, usually a mesh of commercially run segments; and one for the Emergency Services - police, ambulance, and fire - run by the municipality. The service some fire companies run includes digital data for things like building blueprints and hazardous waste permits. In some places the Federal government and the military run their own networks in the same spectrum, in others they have spectrum allocated to them by the NCIA (the FCC for the Federal Government). Yes there are a lot of potential clients, and yes, their are issues of congestion, but I don't believe any of them are show stoppers given the accomplishments of the non-computer communications industries.
I don't think that access should be free, but I do think that I should only have to pay once for access - wired, broadband, wireless, whatever. If I am a customer of an ISP, then I should be able to use my accces in whatever way I can. I think the crime is having to pay for RF wireless airtime to access my ISP in addition to paying for the ISP.
My ideal would be something like this: residents of a geographic area pay for the infrastructure through property taxes and then have free access to the ISP of their choice. Non residents (tourists or road-warriors) could buy time at a ATM or similar kiosk to access the wireless network as a portal to their ISP or corporate network. In large metro areas, or in areas with a lot of mobility (DC-Baltmore-NOVA or NYC-Boston) a customer could get a cut rate for neighboring zones and the billing could be automatic, like when you go outside of your cell network, or from digital to analog with a roaming plan.
This would make the spectrum public access but the ISP's would still have their ability to charge for access.
It is revolutionary as it makes wireless infrastructure funding a public expense like highway funds, so I doubt it would ever happen, but it would be nice.
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Is virtual community's destiny to replace real life? I don't think so. But virtual communities can supplant the real world, if they can survive. I believe the ultimate failure of virtual communitites stem from two problems: the failure to get members to 'stick', and the inherant dangers of rampant liberty. The first, mobility of members, is something that has successfully been overcome by some communities with common interest (like a users group) and by others with content, commonality, and ease of use (like AOL). The problem of liberty however, is best demonstrated by the chaos of an unmoderated chat room. Another problem with liberty is that the powerful - and in a technilogical realm I believe power is directly related to ability - are able to impose their will upon the less powerful. Now, not all power is bad - the open source movement is a premier example of benevolant power - but there are those who seek to utilize their power to the detriment of the weak. That is the the reason for the need for some governance - to protect the weak from the wicked. Community rulership, in whatever for it takes, must have the power of banishment and exile - the virtual equivalent of death - as a method for dealing with the worst offences, things like cracking, fraud, activity that is related to capital crimes like cyber-stalking, information theft and offences of that nature which are wholly in opposition to the values of the community. Lesser offenses might include flaming, libel or slander, the results of stupidity or negligence such as security gaffs. These could be dealt with through a ranking and demerit system which has real consequences in terms of acccess, cost, benefits. In a virtual community, the desire of the members is to be included, by leveraging this desire into the 'criminal code' the community members are faced with the choice of inclusion or lawlessness. Once the ranking system is in place, part of the acent in power is the responsibility to govern within the community - observing and doing nothing when an offence takes place, such as a flame in a chatroom, could have a higher penalty than the flaming itself. The growth of the polity creates the need for bodies of rule and appeal, and these should be members who are held accountable for their own actions as well as how they govern.
The issue you seem to be focusing on is that one node can only support x number of clients and that these clients have to each have their own exclusive bandwidth to talk to the node. 802.11 clearly isn't suited for this kind of application, but there are ways to give a million users mobile, wireless access with throughput and speed of service sufficient to make the user happy. Commercial trunked radio gets around this problem, cramming thousands and thousands of handheld and vehicle radios into both the 400MHz and 800MHz broadcast spectrum by segmenting the spectrum into 25Mhz channels and assigning addresses to the clients and broadcasting packets in each channel, just like ethernet. These networks are distributed in peer to peer nets of nodes which act like cell phone cells. Every major metro has at least two of these networks up and running right now - one for taxis and delivery trucks, usually a mesh of commercially run segments; and one for the Emergency Services - police, ambulance, and fire - run by the municipality. The service some fire companies run includes digital data for things like building blueprints and hazardous waste permits. In some places the Federal government and the military run their own networks in the same spectrum, in others they have spectrum allocated to them by the NCIA (the FCC for the Federal Government). Yes there are a lot of potential clients, and yes, their are issues of congestion, but I don't believe any of them are show stoppers given the accomplishments of the non-computer communications industries.
I don't think that access should be free, but I do think that I should only have to pay once for access - wired, broadband, wireless, whatever. If I am a customer of an ISP, then I should be able to use my accces in whatever way I can. I think the crime is having to pay for RF wireless airtime to access my ISP in addition to paying for the ISP. My ideal would be something like this: residents of a geographic area pay for the infrastructure through property taxes and then have free access to the ISP of their choice. Non residents (tourists or road-warriors) could buy time at a ATM or similar kiosk to access the wireless network as a portal to their ISP or corporate network. In large metro areas, or in areas with a lot of mobility (DC-Baltmore-NOVA or NYC-Boston) a customer could get a cut rate for neighboring zones and the billing could be automatic, like when you go outside of your cell network, or from digital to analog with a roaming plan. This would make the spectrum public access but the ISP's would still have their ability to charge for access. It is revolutionary as it makes wireless infrastructure funding a public expense like highway funds, so I doubt it would ever happen, but it would be nice.