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 Wireless activists bring the battle over public space to the airwaves. The Metropolis Observed August/September 2001
In response, independent groups in cities around the world--including London, New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon--have been developing wireless neighborhood networks using a technological standard known as 802.11b, or Wi-Fi. Volunteers hook up a base station to their home computer, place an antenna on a rooftop or in a window, and broadcast a signal that can be received free of charge by anyone who is located within a few blocks and has a $75 transceiver on their computer. The immediate result is a local-area network like those found in schools and offices. In some cases this includes a free link to the volunteer's Internet access. The networks operate on the same unlicensed bandwidth that cordless phones use. The short range of the radio signal means that unlike users of the worldwide Internet, members must actually be in the same geographical area. This physical propinquity is at odds with what we have come to expect from the Web--and blissfully so. "I'd really like the wireless network to become useful in and of itself," explains Adam Shand, the founder of PersonalTelco, the Portland arm of the movement. "I'd like to see if this can provide a place where people can freely express themselves and become something that a community would be proud of." Visions of the CB radio craze come instantly to mind. If the 1980s computer pioneers lived close to their machines, and the 1990s gold diggers of the dot-com age plundered them, today's wireless activists are the cyber-equivalents of organic farmers--searching for both a technical purity and a model of sustainability. "It's the way the Internet used to be," notes Ken Caruso, a member of Seattle-Wireless. "It's a computer network without profit or political constraints. There's no governing body, there's no usage restriction, and the radio band that it operates on is publicly licensed." But, Caruso admits, "There's a lot of opportunities for people to get pissed off." On the online movement's discussion boards, there is increasing concern about what might happen next. Given the enormous size of the private networks--Level 3 Communications alone spent more than $2 billion in the last three years on a nationwide flber-optic network--the wireless activists are running around with giants, and they're bound to step on some corporate toes. A prime contender is Texas-based MobileStar, which has already installed hundreds of fee-based 802.11b Internet nodes in airports, hotels, and coffee shops and plans to wire 70 percent of Starbucks' North American stores within the next few years. "There's certainly competition at the physical level," Shand warns. "You can only have so many of these wireless access points in a physical area--and it's possible that if every Starbucks and airport and coffee shop has them, then it may be harder and harder for them and us to run our nodes successfully. At that point it will probably come down to litigation, and they'll probably win." "But," he adds, "so long as our end goal is to build a community and a network that we're proud of, and that does something that we feel is useful, I don't really see that they can take that away from us." |
