Hi. I'm also fairly new to town, and I just subscribed to the list. I'm
excited to see discussion of a wireless community network, since some of
my friends and I have given the subject a lot of thought in the past
couple years, developing a pretty cool concept for a wireless-based
cooperative broadband ISP. (Basically the idea is to share the costs of
upstream connectivity throughout an egalitarian web-topology network.) We
haven't ever really done much but talk about it, since we're all young and
poor without much in the way of connections or ambition... but I hope I
can be of some help if anybody ever does try to put together a wireless
network in town.
The major problem I see with available 802.11-based equipment is that it's
all client/server... which works fine if you just want a little
short-range star-topology office network, but tends to break down with
large numbers of users or sites. It's too centralised. The peer-to-peer
capable microwave units I've heard about aren't capable of multipoint
connections. A multipoint peer-to-peer web-topology network could be
basically self-organizing while minimizing power consumption and
interference. Has anybody heard tell of a wireless chipset that can do
simultaneous multiple peer-to-peer connections?
On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Seth Cohn wrote:
> > I have a question for you. Is anyone interested in establishing a free,
> > public access wireless network in downtown Eugene. What I have in mind
> > is the kind of project groups like Seattle Wireless
> > (http://seattlewireless.net/), pdxwirless.org
> > (http://www.pdxwireless.org/faq.html), and yyy () are into? See
> > http://seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/SimilarProjectLinks for a more
> > complete list of such projects.
>
> We've been talking about this in the last few days... where have you
> been?
