Building a Free Wireless Backbone?

DigiWood asks: "Ok. I have been remembering the old days of BBS's. When you sent mail from one system to another it had to dial up and transmit it. Given the ability to wirelessly interconnect nodes in a city why hasn't anyone suggested that wireless server interconnects get put up? I know that people have 802.11b public access points. What I am talking about is aggregating these wireless islands together to form a sort of wireless backbone. A free wireless backbone. The only place you'd need a pop is the downlink into the hardwired internet. There could be multiple downlinks. With the advent of companies like Vonage that supply IP telephony the local telco could be cut out. I am not looking for a debate over which telco is worst. Nor any of the major media provider bashing as of late. Just a discussion of the whys and why nots to putting this together."

Re:Similar projects

[smallfries]

And here is another one in the uk:

Mobile Bristol [guardian.co.uk]

Too Early

[wa4osh]

1) Your point of resistance to change is well taken. But people do move from the familiar to something better for example from Black and White TV to Color, 8mm movies to video tape, film to digital pictures... I think the important thing is to solve a problem. For example, what is the reason to upgrade from analog TV to the new digital HDTVs? Does it solve a problem for me? My TV works just fine. People have the Internet thing solved at home for the most part - it gives them access to the internet at home so they can read e-mails and get on their chat groups. They have not really been given a good enough reason to upgrade. At home they will ask for access points so that they can use their laptops in the backyard. Except that their laptop does not work everywhere. Hotspots are the attempt to add locations where their laptop will work 2) Maybe you can argue that e-mail is the killer AP for the Internet. For 3G it seems to be ridiculous stuff like downloading ringtones and backgrounds see http://www.commsdesign.com/news/market_news/OEG200 21127S0042 (it too moves data) 802.11's current WLAN "killer AP" is in schools. The largest number of commercial grade access points is being sold to school districts, not to hotspots. 802.11 allows teachers to bring the computer to where the kids are learning rather than bringing the kids to the computer lab. It's lots less expensive than wiring each and every classroom for computers. But can 802.11 provide a WWAN "killer AP"? I think hotspots are a definite attempt here. 3) The price of 802.11 gear will come down even further since most all laptops will have 802.11b and 802.11a connections by next year. Intel is providing the chipsets. 4) Yes we need more spectrum, but the right kind of spectrum. We need a band that can traverse through trees and building walls and still have small antennas. Something in the 300 MHz-1000 Mhz band would be ideal. It so happens that Senators George Allen (R.-Va.) and Barbara Boxer (D.-Ca.) are circulating a draft bill to gain early support in the 108th Congress to promote a wireless approach to broadband deployment. An Allen spokesperson said the bill and accompanying "Dear Colleague" letter are efforts to "get beyond the stalemated debate of cable versus DSL." The draft legislation calls for the Federal Communications Commission to allocate not less than 255 megahertz of contiguous spectrum below 6 gigahertz for unlicensed use by wireless broadband devices. I think this would be a good opportunity to contact your repersentatives and back this bill. Ask for shared use of the UHF television band from 470MHz (ch14) to 698 MHz (ch51) under part 15. This is 228 Mhz of contiguous prime beachhead on this very underused band. This band penetrates building walls and trees much better than 2.4 or 5 GHz. And under low power restrictions (such as part 15 ERP limits), can still reach 30 miles. Why not share that spectrum under part 15 on those channels where no local UHF broadcasts exist? Properly designed equipment that is low power and that limits interference with UHF broadcasters should work well. This should help tremendously in cutting the cost of getting to the Tier1 Internet. Currently, the TELCOs are still maintaining their cash extraction monopoly by being the middle man to smaller Tier2 and Tier3 ISPs and commercial enterprises. 5) I think you will pretty much always need to have a connection to the Tier1 backbone and that will eventually cost someone somewhere. 6) I'm not sure having a real IP address is a requirement.