The Cooperative Approach
The difficulties of a commercial approach to
wireless access exist because of a
single social phenomenon: the customer is purchasing a solution and
is therefore expecting a reasonable level of service for their money.
In a commercial venture, the WISP is ultimately responsible for
upholding their end of the agreement or otherwise compensating the
customer.
The "last mile" problem has a
very different outlook if each member of the network is responsible
for keeping his own equipment online. Like many ideas whose time has
come, the community access wireless network phenomenon is unfolding
right now, all over the planet. People who are fed up with long lead
times and high equipment and installation costs are pooling their
resources to provide wireless access to friends, family, neighbors,
schools, and remote areas that will likely never see broadband access
otherwise. As difficult as the WISP nightmare example has made this
idea sound, people everywhere are learning that they
don't necessarily need to pay their dues to the
telco to make astonishing things happen. They are discovering that it
is indeed possible to provide very high bandwidth connections to
those who need it for pennies—not hundreds of dollars—a
month.
Of course, people who are expected to run a wireless gateway need
access either to highly technical information, or to a solution that
is no more difficult than plugging in a connector and flipping a
switch. While bringing common experiences together can help find an
easy solution more quickly, only a relatively small percentage of
people on this planet know that microwave communications are even
possible. Even fewer know how to effectively connect a wireless
network to the Internet. As we'll see later,
ubiquity is critical if wide area wireless access is going to be
usable (even to the techno über-elite). It is in
everyone's best interest to
cooperate, share what they know, and help make bandwidth as pervasive
as the air we breathe.
The desire to end this separation of "those in the
know" from "those who want to
know" is helping to bring people away from their
computer screens and back into their local neighborhoods. In the last
year, hundreds of independent local groups have formed with a very
similar underlying principle: get people connected to each other for
the lowest possible cost. Web sites, mailing lists, community
meetings, and even IRC channels are being set up to share information
about extending wireless network access to those who need it.
Wherever possible, ingeniously simple and inexpensive (yet powerful)
designs are being drawn up and given away. Thousands of people are
working on this problem not for a personal profit motive, but for the
benefit of the planet.
It is worth pointing out here that ISPs and telcos are in no way
threatened by this technology; in fact, Internet service will be in
even greater demand as wireless cooperatives come online. The
difference is that many end users will have access without the need
to tear down trees and dig up streets, and many others may find that
network access in popular areas will be provided gratis, as a
community service or on a cooperative trust basis, rather than as a
corporate commodity.
Wireless networks can also be a tremendous boon in helping to fight
censorship (both intentional and accidental). In traditional wired
networks, those responsible for the existence of the network can
exert a high degree of control over what happens "on
their wires." Through border firewalls, proxies,
packet filters, and clever routing, the ultimate network content that
is available to an individual can be manipulated to an almost
infinite degree. Even well-intentioned administrators who might block
a port or service "for the good of the
network" can unintentionally restrict the flow of
information for perfectly legitimate users.
The rules are very different when the wires are taken away. Anyone
with a wireless card can effectively generate whatever sort of packet
they like and send it out to anyone within range. As long as nodes
can agree on a common method of communications, any number of
wireless networks can be created to exchange data in a way that makes
it prohibitively difficult for a single entity to impose any sort of
restriction on the flow of that data. Since the people involved in
setting up such networks are by definition trying to communicate with
each other, this can help bring about a strong sense of community.
Many people find that they enjoy having a hand in building a
communications infrastructure that fits their needs.
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