MIT Technology Review Unwiring the Web

"It’s an increasingly common scene: a telecommuter perched on a park bench, pecking away at a laptop. But a peek over her shoulder reveals a more startling sight: she’s surfing the Web, outdoors and cable free.

Anywhere, anytime Internet access is gaining ground across the United States as wireless networks owned and run by their users spring up in more cities each month—25 at last count."

Icon Wireless wonders

"Imagine the scenario: you get together with the occupants of your block (be it a block of flats or group of homes). You decide to buy one Internet connection for the entire block. You hook a broadband cable or ADSL modem up to a Wi-Fi access point, and presto: everybody within 100 metres of the access point has high-speed Internet access for virtually nothing. You can split the cost of the Internet access - divided among 20 or 30 people the cost is negligible, maybe a few dollars per person per month. What's more, you can communicate within this community quickly and easily. You could even set up community network printers and scanners and the like.

It may sound far-fetched, but in fact with Wi-Fi it is very easy to do. The difficult part would be maintaining access control so only the people who paid could access the Net connection."

News.Com Survey: Local wireless networks to nip 3G sales

"Wireless hotspots using public access local area networks in airports, hotels and even on Japanese trains may face temporary problems like the rest of the telecoms industry. But the mid-term predictions are for massive growth. And as Clive Couldwell point outs, they will not only be an increasing threat to mobile operators but also provide plenty of opportunity for fixed-line operators and isps to add some mobile services cheaply."

"Mobile operators should certainly be worried. The combination of no licence fees - because they operate in the unlicenced 2.4 ghz band - relatively cheap and easy installation, a wide and growing potential customer base and high-speed connectivity - offering data rates of up to 11 mbps to wireless-enabled laptops or handhelds within 50 metres of any access point - means that these wireless hotspots will spread ever faster across the world."

Total Telecom Hotspots mean business

"Fast Internet access over small wireless networks in restaurants, hotels and airports will soon start hurting telecommunications operators, a new survey found Monday.

More than 20 million Europeans will use some 90,000 open Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) by 2006, market research group Analysys said. Today there are up to 20,000 WLAN users, most in the United States."

redux [08.26.01]
Infoworld 'Parasitic grid' wireless movement may threaten telecom profits

"AN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT to deploy free wireless access zones in metropolitan areas is taking hold. If it turns out to be successful, wireless network operators may be fighting against a grounds-up movement that could undermine their multibillion-dollar campaign to offer next-generation 3G (third-generation) wireless services in major metro areas.

The movement, called by some the "parasitic grid" and by others more simply the "free metro wireless data network," has already installed itself in New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Aspen, Colo., Portland, Ore., British Columbia; and London."

redux [04.14.01]
The Street Can You Kiss 3G Goodbye -- and Still Make a Buck?

"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.

A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."

redux [09.09.01]
Infoworld Users reject notion of 'parasitic grid'

"Burton subscribes to the term "Open Network Access Point," believing the scale that could be achieved by widespread adoption of wireless access point would be amazing.

But as with many stories, there is a dark side. Both Burton and Pozer agree individual providers of these access points, which can cost as little as $150, must be aware of the legal implications."

""The Internet has always been revolutionary," Burton said. "What you're seeing now is the old school revolting.""

O'Reilly Network Weblogs: David Sims A "parasitic grid"? At these rates?

"That was funny. I laughed and laughed. It doesn't feel very parasitic every month when I pay my DSL bill. There's nothing parasitic about a community network. The bandwidth is paid for. People are taking their existing connections and letting other people share it. There's nothing new.

I think what has people scared is that, as I know and others know, bandwidth is significantly oversold. If everybody wanted to request their 384 kilobits or their 1.5 Mbps at the same time, you'd have the same thing happening that you had in the twenties with the run on the banks. The infrastructure can't support it, even though it's sold as such. I think that's where the fear is coming from on the telco side."

redux [08.15.01]
The Village Voice High Speed, Freed

""This is why I love New York," says Anthony Townsend, standing in the middle of Washington Square Park, holding his laptop computer like a butler's tray and scanning the adult playground the place becomes on hot summer evenings. Where else, he asks, can you walk around with a computer, surf the Web, and go utterly unnoticed?

As if to prove his invisibility, or perhaps to demonstrate that he belongs, he hoists his machine like some digital prayerbook and begins chanting: "Jesus! Jesus! Thank you!"

No one - not the guy playing the Ramones on acoustic guitar, not the tonguing teenage lovers - notices this modern miracle worker or the cybernet he has cast around them. Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost"

redux [12.10.00]
Washington Post 'Free' Wireless Networks?

"With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.

The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations."

""I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."

Salon Unchaining the Net

"Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if the whole shebang actually worked, they figured they'd be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than what cellphone operators or other wireless providers offered."

"Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere."