Folks, I believe the time has come to stop thinking locally about free networks, and start thinking globally about member supported networks. I would rather pay a small fee to have wireless everywhere, than have wireless in only a couple spots for free.
That being said, I would NOT want to pay that fee to a government or corporate monopoly. I DO want to pay that fee to the access point operators who are providing the upstream bandwidth and hardware. I have an idea for a democratic, non-profit organization that would manage this member supported network. I call it WiFi Coop (sorry if you hate the marketing term WiFi...) Coop = Cooperative, though for legal reasons I can't call it a cooperative. http://www.wificoop.org/ If this sounds good to anyone, please contact me. I'd love to talk about this, and even more to get things started. Scott -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
