Techno-rebels spread wireless network vision
On the surface, it looks like an ordinary weeknight gathering of aimless guys. A dozen men on a back porch chew thick slices of delivered pizza between rat-a-tat banter. One wears a bandanna. Another sports a John Deere T-shirt. Several have counterculture beards.
But beneath the raffish exterior lie some high-watt minds. The talk is about bandwidths and binary codes.
Meet the geeks, a selective handful of Portland's brightest computer science gurus who gather weekly at Node 236 - aka Tom Higgins's house - to discuss all things wireless. They are modern-day freedom fighters trying to encourage people to host wireless connections to the Internet, with the hope of eventually unplugging the entire city.
The idea: If enough people share bandwdith and a spot on their window ledge for a small radio antenna, eventually anyone in the city will be able to go online free. It's a new form of civic activism - driven by computer programmers who want to pool their collective knowledge for the greater good.
"It's not necessarily about giving [Internet access] away for free," says Aaron Baer, the treasurer for Personal Telco. "It's more about trying to build a community, and allowing the local community to build infrastructure for communication."
Wireless fidelity (wi-fi), whether free or not, is a movement that's catching on across the country, but particularly in the Northwest. Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Ore., are among the four most "unwired" cities in the country (Austin, Texas, ranks third), according to a recent Intel survey.
Others are well on their way to adopting similar free access alternatives, sometimes with city funding. San Jose, Calif., and Alexandria, Va., for instance, have recently launched small-scale projects that offer up three or four free 'hot spots' (an access point where people can log onto the Internet wirelessly). Philadelphia and Minneapolis have plans to go completely wireless.
Seattle considered blanketing its center with free access, but local residents and businesses already paying for the services have created a de facto patchwork of access points, rendering a formal push for wireless almost moot. Ditto for San Francisco and Portland.
Despite the good intentions, opening wide the gates to high-speed Internet connections at little or no cost to users is drawing complaints from business owners and telecommunication companies who do charge for their service. But these are still the cowboy days of wireless fidelity with few rules and regulations, giving volunteer groups like Portland's Personal Telco and Seattle Wireless ample opportunity to continue building their home-grown empires.
"We're not just building hot spots, we're building a network across Portland," says Mr. Higgins. "If the Internet ever fell away, this network would still be up."
With help from Personal Telco, community members and businesses can become wireless hot spots, or a "node," for a typical fee of $50 to $100 a month. Small radio towers are installed on the owner's property that allow anyone with a receiver within a 300-foot radius to log on to the Internet free of charge. At the moment, the group says it has more than 100 active nodes throughout the city.
"The thought is that as we build a community we can say, 'Hey, can we get on your roof and put an antenna up there?' " says Mr. Baer, who is involved with a grant to set up subsidized access points in Portland's less-privileged neighborhoods.
But the free wi-fi movement doesn't always find warm reception. While some see getting everyone online as a community-building venture, others think too much wi-fi could actually have the opposite effect.
Victrola Coffee & Arts cofounder Jen Strongin, one of the first in Seattle to offer free wi-fi a few years ago, has chosen to cut back on the service on weekends, bemoaning a total lack of interaction between cafe goers. On the weekends, she says, most tables are filled with people who camp out with laptops up to eight hours a day without talking to anyone.
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