[commedia] Community Owned Distribution

[Henry O'Tani]

Here is a link to an article that EVERY MEMBER of the COMMUNITY MEDIA
ASSOCIATION should understand about the future REAL possibilities of delivering "Community Media" via a "Community owned and managed network"


Henry O'Tani

www.wlan.org.uk



The Corner Internet Network vs. the Cellular Giants
 By JOHN MARKOFF
 The New York Times On-the-Web

 SAN FRANCISCO, March 4, 2002

 The informal Wi-Fi networks that inexpensively provide wireless Internet
 access are fine, as far as they go - which is generally a few hundred
 feet. But what happens when there are enough of them to weave together
 in a blanket of Internet coverage?

 What begins to appear is a high-speed wireless data network built from
 the bottom up, rather than the top-down wireless cellular data networks
 now being established by giant telecommunications companies.

 Many Silicon Valley engineers now believe that it will be possible to
 take the tens of thousands of inexpensive wireless network connections
 that are popping up in homes and coffee shops all over the country and
 lash them together into a single anarchic wireless network. Connections
 could theoretically be passed from one Wi- Fi node to another, similar
 to the way wireless phone signals pass from cell to cell, thereby
 significantly extending the wired Internet.

 Modeled closely on the original nature of the Internet, which grew by
 chaining together separate computer networks, the technology - known as
 wireless mesh routing - is being rapidly embraced in the United States
 as well as in the developing world, where it is viewed as a low-cost
 method for quickly building network infrastructure.

 If the engineers are right, the popular and inexpensive Wi-Fi wireless
 standard, also known as 802.11, could serve as the wedge for the
 next-generation Internet, enabling a new wave of wireless portable
 gadgets that ultimately blanket homes, schools and shopping malls with
 Internet access.

 Currently most 802.11 networks serve as individual beacons that provide
 wireless Internet connections to portable computers situated within 200
 feet or so of an 802.11 transmitter. What wireless mesh routing offers
 is the promise of a vastly more powerful collaboration driven by the
 same forces that originally built the Internet.

 "The good news is that broadband wireless access will finally explode,"
 said Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the M.I.T Media Laboratory.
 "The social contract is simple: you can use mine when you are in the
 vicinity of Mount Vernon Street, Boston. But I want to be able to use
 yours when I am near you."

 The technology is being driven both by a gaggle of ambitious start-up
 companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and by a hobbyist movement
 that mimics the original Homebrew Club that led to the personal computer
 industry.

 Today, Tim Pozar and several of his friends are seizing the high ground,
 literally and figuratively, in a movement that could undercut the
 nation's cellular companies, which are investing tens of millions of
 dollars in top-down, heavily engineered, digital cellular networks.

 Mr. Pozar, a radio engineer, is a member of the Bay Area Wireless Users
 Group, an active band of hobbyists who have been building free networks
 in communities through the region. Mr. Pozar and some of his friends
 have quietly begun obtaining the rights to place $2,000 wireless network
 access stations on the mountains and hilltops that encircle San
 Francisco Bay. If he succeeds, the network will be a starting point for
 a wireless data network that could eventually spread all over the Bay
 Area.
 Significantly, what will set Mr. Pozar's planned Sunset Network and
 those like it apart from the commercial cellular networks now being
 constructed at great expense is that they will "self assemble" -
 expanding from one neighborhood to the next as individuals and
 businesses join by buying their own cheap antennas that either attach to
 the wired Internet or pass a signal on to another wireless node.

 Mr. Pozar has even come up with a new acronym to describe his plan. In
 addition to the existing terminology of LAN's and WAN's - local and wide
 area networks - he is proposing the idea of NAN's, or neighborhood area
 networks. The so-called Nanny Networks are rapidly becoming the hottest
 thing in Silicon Valley and internationally. There are now at least 19
 companies developing proprietary wireless mesh routing technologies, all
 trying to replicate the original Internet in a wireless form.

 It is not an easy task because the companies are engineering for a new
 kind of design, with which they must route data packets over paths where
 network nodes constantly pop up and disappear. Moreover, wireless
 networks must overcome an array of environmental obstacles that do not
 plague wired networks, including hills, rain and trees.

 Such networks, however, do have the critical advantage of economy of
 scale. In contrast to the cellular data networks, in which every
 customer is an added cost, in some respects in wireless mesh networks
 the more users who join the better the network performs. In the jargon
 of Silicon Valley, wireless mesh routing is potentially a "disruptive
 technology," a new technology that is likely to upset the existing order
 by using the same powerful economics of cost and scale that initially
 drove the growth of the commercial Internet.

 Already, companies like Mesh Networks, based in Maitland, Fla., are
 selling systems of wireless routers, making it possible to create
 self-assembling and self-healing networks that would cover an urban
 area. There are also companies like Boingo Wireless and Sputnik, which
 focus on software and services that make it possible for wireless users
 to roam among networks. Similar technologies were crucial in the
 development of the original nationwide analog cellular voice networks.
 In Silicon Valley, companies like Skypilot Network, FHP Wireless,
 Ultradevices, CoWave Networks, SRI's Packet Hop and others are all
 developing networks that have the potential to weave together networks
 made up of wireless antennas.

 "We're going to start seeing more mom-and- pop Internet service
 providers buying access points that will support 802.11," Mr. Pozar
 said. "At first I thought it was going to just be geeks doing wireless,
 but now everyone has one of these things deployed."



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