Community Wireless Networks in the UK 83
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.
A better place to start (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A better place to start (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.wlan.org.uk [wlan.org.uk]
They are number 5 on the Top WLAN Sites list [topsitelists.com]
Re:Community wireless will never succeed (Score:4, Informative)
Then you have groups like SeattleWireless [seattlewireless.net] 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 (Score:1)
P.S. You spelled tolerance wrong in your signature... I'm assuming it's a joke?
RADIUS and LDAP (Score:1)
Re:Community wireless will never succeed (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Community wireless will never succeed (Score:2)
well, my website uses about 15 gigabytes a day in transfers... 450GB a month, yet i only pay $39.99 for DSL........... this SORTA proves that on average, you can deal with a couple hogs and still turn a profit. everyone in the neighborhood could just pay fixed fee (cost / number of users) and they would probably all be happy.
Define success, first! (Score:1)
Like hell it's not. If I plug in the WAP and start transmitting, I'm creating bandwidth for free, aren't I? Now, Internet bandwidth, that's another story -- it's not free, neither as-in-beer, nor as-in-freedom, thanks to the telco/cable monopolies that are, for most people, the only way of getting bits out the door.
Being able to surf the web from the cafe while sipping a latte is not particularly interesting. What's interesting is how communities are coming together to build MANs and other networks that are free-as-in-freedom -- networks that are distributed, in the hands of the people, and free from corporate or government interference. The real revolution is happening outside the coffee shop, where we're building these networks, node by node, as we speak.
So what purpose will these community networks serve? Who knows! Remember, the Internet was designed to keep US government networks alive through a nuclear war -- who could have envisioned Slashdot, Amazon, Napster, et al. emerging from that? We believe that if we build it, they will come. (And so what if they don't -- I'll still be able to trade files with and make phone calls to my neighbors.)
Re:Define success, first! (Score:2)
How do you measure cost effectiveness? cost/area/achieveable bitrate might be a good metric. Wonder what the metric for cell phone masts would be. Those cells are measured in tens of miles, whereas most WAPS can do 100m or so can't they? That's 10,000x more area covered for a cell phone.
Hmm. Wonder how much a mast costs to put up; if it costs a million then it might be comparable. Interesting. Suspect a cell mast is cheaper than that though, but the WAP costs should be coming down too.
Re:Define success, first! (Score:1)
Success depends on your goals (Score:1)
Whether public WLAN succeeds or not depends on your perspective.
I would say that grassrots wireless networking alreeady has suceeded. Of ourse there will probably never be a coverage compared to the coverage of GMS or future UMTS, but people are beginning to share their bandwith already.
Yes, WLAN has some inherent security-risks, and yes, WLAN providers will not be compensated for there service but if you have a look at the web there is a lot of good stuff that is provided by people with absolutely no compensation.
From my personal point of view the WLAN-movement already has succeeded: People are alread sharing their bandwith and start building up their own networks.
So don't expect too much by the WLAN-"movement" - people started sharing their bandwith with wired LANs some years ago. It' didn't kill the TelCos, but it quite common, now and kind of a success.
Re:Community wireless will never succeed (Score:2)
Besides, bandwidth is rapidly getting cheaper and cheaper. The cost halves ever few years as the fiber optic backbones deliver lower cost per bit; DWDM, greater range and so forth; and there's a long way to go yet on that front I'd bet.
$1 to $2 per gigabyte is still pretty cheap; it's about as cheap as a CD-R. At 576k it would take me hours to download that much even maxing out the link. Even a $5 a day bill for an internet cafe does not seem outrageous if it pulls in a few more punters; it would atleast break even, and that's pretty worst case I would think.
Re:"Not really any new news" (Score:2)
The future of Wireless (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, we have a long way to go before we get there. As the article mentions, the 2.4 GHz band is slowly being used for more and more transmissions. Unless we regulate usage in some way, the wireless world will become impossible to achieve, as the noise would be too great.
Another problem is that of price. In order to have a fully connected network, you would have to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of nodes placed throughout the world. The unfortunate truth is that SOMEONE would have to pay for that, whether it is a private company or government(s).
Once you DO have such a network, however, control becomes an issue. If the network is privately controlled, someone could be making a bundle off of everyone's usage. If the government controlled it, it could be used for propaganda. If I had to chooose one over the other, I would choose a group of nations (the UN?) to control it, and it could become another sanction they could place.
Can anyone else see this happeneing?
Re:The future of Wireless (Score:1)
Make internet access a utility.
If there was a law like there is for the US Mail, telephony, and I'm sure many other public services that stated that everyone had to have access to the internet (as long as they wanted to pay) then usage would skyrocket. Cel towers would sprout digital antennae and you'd be able to get access from anywhere you now get cel access. Small receivers for these towers would appear on the market, and people would snap them up so that they could check their e-mail from their palm or laptop. Router and firewall sales would go through the roof as everyone (read: geek) who cannot currently get decent access (like me!) suddenly was able to, inexpensively, route WAN packets across their home LAN. The web as a communication tool would be much more viable, since once a critical mass of users was reached, the user base would snowball because nobody with a computer could be without speedy access.
I don't expect to have days when I wake up and only get 90 volts worth of electricity to my house. If someone told my I had to use morse code instead of voice because my lines were cheap or I was too far from the central office, I'd get my gun. The fact that a huge number of users are still stuck with 56k (or less) dialup access is unacceptable.
I don't know why some company doesn't realize that there is a huge demand for 10 megabit access and people are willing to pay for it. I know if someone called me and said "would you like 10-T access run to your house for, say, $60 a month, I'd ask where to sign. I see all this access... Cable, DSL, ISDN, and none of it is available where I live. My options are 56k (which is more like 28k) or satellite (which sucks for reasons I won't explain here). The first company that runs fiber to neighborhoods stuck out in the boonies wins... go!
Re:The future of Wireless (Score:2)
>Unless we regulate usage in some way, the wireless world will become impossible to achieve, as the
>noise would be too great.
You call that noise? I call that connectivity! Why shouldn't I use them for accessing the internet? The 2.4 Ghz air waves are free; even if the backbone isn't. Why shouldn't they use me? It isn't necessarily the case that because they use my equipment, I pay for their traffic; our ISP can have them sign on through a firewall (VPN) and ensure they don't use more traffic per second than they've paid for.
If the 2.4 Ghz band is becoming used for more transmissions; that's largely a good thing. Multistandard transmitters are already appearing.
>Once you DO have such a network, however, control becomes an issue. If the network is privately
>controlled, someone could be making a bundle off of everyone's usage."
I expect that it may be simply free, i.e. paid for via other means. The roads could be like that too, except the government levies a tax which is (in the UK) about 10x the amount they actually spend on the roads. Otherwise, it will be a once a year/month licence no doubt.
>If the government controlled it, it could be used for propaganda.
Yeah right. So you've grown the internet via wireless tech and suddenly the whole internet is either owned by someone OR (exclusive OR?) its all just government propaganda?
Really? I don't think so...
Why so hung up about control? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [sydneywireless.com]. I have a couple links [nyx.net] 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..
Re:This will always be unworkable. (Score:1)
But if the point is to build a "parallel network" that's distributed, free from the telco monopolies, and in the hands of the people -- a network that's free-as-in-freedom -- then you can't truthfully say it's unworkable, because we're making it work as we speak.
Check out Joltage.com (Score:2, Informative)
I guess the personaltelco site already got /.ed (Score:1)
hmm (Score:1)
man i hate these stories... (Score:1, Offtopic)
200GBps wireless community LAN... in my city? never. ugh.
Some other networks/wireless networking sites (Score:3, Informative)
http://austinwireless.net
http://www.milehighw
http://free2air.org
http://consume.n
http://bcwireless.net
http://www.bawug.org
h
http://nycwireless.
Re:Some other networks/wireless networking sites (Score:1)
But can I pick it up on my fillings? (Score:1, Funny)
fine wire and ShoeGoo
One of these days this tooth is gonna browse through all Yahoo!
Consume.net isn't the only one (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Consume.net isn't the only one (Score:2)
You're massively overestimating the level of organisation within Consume.
Re:Consume.net isn't the only one (Score:1)
Re:Consume.net isn't the only one (Score:2)
Sadly, that's a common human trait.
Oh, and don't go putting Glasgownet's url on
If you're in greater seattle... (Score:1)
One network in Glasgow, Scotland (Score:1)
Also you may be interested in the Edinburgh Wireless network --- Backnet [backnet.org.uk] which is a little more established than Glasgow. Both projects are generating a lot of interest but we need as many people as possible so if you are interested then check out the Consume.net Node Database [consume.net] to find out who's near you.
The GlasgowNet [glasgownet.com] page also has some news, reviews and articles that may be of use to people interested in Wireless networks. Both Backnet and GlasgowNet have IRC channels so feel free to come on and have a chat. The Backnet channel is #backnet on irc.backnet.org.uk and GlasgowNet is #glasgownet on the same server. If you don't have an IRC client then GlasgowNet is testing a Java applet IRC interface [gla.ac.uk] that you may want to try.