IT IS difficult these days to avoid wi-fi. The idea of being able to connect to the Web from anywhere via a wireless link is really in vogue. Telecoms companies around the world are locked in battle setting up antennas to convince business people to sign up with them. But what’s not so well known is that if these companies don’t act quickly, they could be sidelined by an alternative model of a wireless Internet, which could rob them of their future earnings. A worldwide group of visionary amateurs sees wi-fi as the perfect way to break free from government regulation and the giant telecoms companies.
Wi-fi – or more properly, IEEE 802.11b – is the radio standard used for wireless computer networking. Rather than connect up computers with costly coaxial cable, wi-fi lets people send up to 11 million bits per second around, say, a building, using a band of the microwave spectrum that is unregulated – at least for now. But in 1997, two new-media designers based in London, James Stevens and Julian Priest, found a more profound use for wi-fi.
The two worked in companies across the street from one another and Stevens’s firm paid for an expensive, high-capacity connection to the Internet. How much better to share that line, but running a wire across the street was illegal. So instead they bought a couple of microwave transceivers and created the first neighbourhood intranet.
Advertisement
From this arrangement grew the idea of a wireless alternative to the Net. Wi-fi transceivers have a range of only about 100 metres, but imagine setting up hundreds of these “hot spots” with overlapping ranges and each one acting as a “router”, directing messages to the relevant destination. You’d have a network that bypasses conventional telecoms networks.
Better still, wi-fi hot spots can extend into streets and public spaces, allowing users to network on the move. Wireless cards for laptops and PDAs are now widely available and cost about £40, so anyone with the right kit can log on when they’re within a hot spot and send not only photos but also video streams to others connected to that node.
Many nodes act not only as local intranets but are also connected to the Net, which means people can browse or check their email, all from a park bench or tea shop – and for nothing. But Stevens reckons that with more and more overlapping nodes, the Net would become increasingly irrelevant, and the whole wireless network would be outside government and commercial control. “It’s a libertarian movement,” he declares. “Free networks should not be constrained, they should be like free speech.”
He set out his vision in 2000 with the launch of “Consume the Net” () in the belief that there must be others out there on the same tack. “But there wasn’t anything quite like us,” says Stevens. Consume runs workshops showing community groups how to set up their own networks. Most of the nodes are run by enthusiasts who’ve set up their hot spot for a few hundred pounds. Others are donated by organisations sympathetic to establishing wireless networks that are free for local people.
Already there may be as many as a thousand nodes across Britain. Arwain, a wi-fi group in Cardiff, reckons its nodes cover 10 square kilometres and is soon to double its coverage.
Around the world, hundreds of geeks have read Consume’s manifesto and acted on it. Networks have popped up from Seattle to Sydney and New York to Melbourne. Personal Telco in Portland, Oregon, has a network of 75 nodes run by volunteers, and has just been granted official not-for-profit status. Some nodes are accessed by people sitting in a local square and surfing the Net from their laptops. “The network needs to be ubiquitous and free, owned by the people who use it and run it,” says the founder Adam Shand.
The NYCwireless network in New York has 160 nodes. One, covering Bryant Park in midtown, is accessed 50 times a day. “That node costs less to maintain in a year than the park spends on trash bags,” says the network’s spokesman Anthony Townsend. The number of users on the network is doubling every three months. “It’s just starting to ramp up as equipment costs fall,” says Townsend.
The notion of neighbourhood networks has still a long way to go before it challenges existing telecoms networks, and companies that run the latter are fighting back. The biggest commercial contender is the cellphone operator T-mobile, which has set up more than 1600 hot spots around the US, most of them in Starbucks coffee shops. Its other sites are mainly in hotels and airports, places it hopes business travellers will want broadband Internet connections.
T-mobile’s expansion across the Atlantic has been slower, with only a handful of nodes in Britain. But other operators can see the money-spinning potential of wi-fi. Metronet in Austria, Megabeam across the whole of Europe, and BT in Britain are all making in-roads. BT wants to set up 4000 nodes in the next three years, focusing mainly on hotels, stations and airports.
And there are other commercial players. Boingo and Joltage, based in the US, offer people who set up hot spots a share of the revenue when people log on through them. Including free community networks, Boingo reckons it has 700 hot spots in the US, one in Canada and a dozen in Britain. Joltage has 90 sites in the US and a handful in Europe and Japan.
But the corporate players still face large hurdles. One banal obstruction is that they haven’t yet agreed billing standards that would allow people to log on at any hot spot, regardless of which company runs it. In the US, an industry group called the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance is trying to sort this out. “Everyone is taking a slightly different approach,” says Dennis Eaton, chairman of WECA. “We may have a single umbrella standard in the next two or three years.”
Another problem is the relative insecurity of sending data across wireless networks. That may restrict the kind of information that business people will want to transmit from departure lounges or hotel lobbies.
So the race is on between companies and community networks. But already some community projects are “going commercial” to fund their expansion. NYCwireless is spinning off a company to set up networks for businesses. Free2air, a London-based group, is doing the same. “We’re both selling bandwidth and giving it away,” says Adam Burns of Free2air.
The group is also developing tools to make it easier to map the extent of hot spots and networks. It has a system for cyclists that allows them to measure the signal strength as they pedal around a neighbourhood. Work is progressing on “spray-on antennas” for network nodes and idiot-proof software for managing community networks.
Community wi-fi clearly faces an uphill struggle. But Stevens is determined. He still believes his approach will win through. “The telecoms system has crippled itself,” he says. “The telecom companies will go under and it’ll all foster the growth of autonomous networks.” So, networkers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your wires.