community wireless and the freenet movement
This page considers community wireless access to the net,
particularly in Australia and New Zealand.
It covers -
introduction
Community wireless networks, sometimes called 'freenets',
offer non-commercial access to small-scale local networks.
Some of those networks include bridges to the internet.
Their development has been driven by the emergence of
wi-fi technology over the past five years and increasing
household uptake of personal computers, particularly in
advanced economies such as Australia.
It has also reflected moves by some municipal governments
to provide free wireless access and enthusiasm by some
advocacy groups for cooperative ICT development, with
many free wireless networks drawing strongly on the time
and expertise of what both critics and supporters have
labelled the free software movement.
One Western Australian advocate comments -
It's
a collection of people who want to be able to interconnect
their computers without having to be beholden to telecommunications
carriers and ISPs.
Imagine, if you will, dozens, or even hundreds of people
throughout Perth, all of whom can connect to services
on each other's computers at broadband speeds. Imagine
being able to provide web services, mail services, games
servers, file archives and so on, without having to
worry about phone line charges, exhausting your download
limits and so on.
As
a phenomenon it is reminiscent of ham radio and community
broadcasting. It is similarly likely to be increasingly
marginalised by regulation and competition from institutional
(commercial or otherwise) delivery of broadband.
development
Wireless community networks essential date from 2000,
with the emergence of the low cost 802.11 Wi-Fi technology
highlighted earlier in this Note and in the Networks
& GII Guide.
Detailed statistics are problematical but diffusion to
major metropolitan centres in advanced economies appears
to have been quite rapid, with most major cities in the
West featuring at least one freenet by 2002. Australian
group Melbourne Wireless for example commenced in December
2001.
Those networks were often geographically concentrated,
consistent with user demographics (eg a high population
of ICT students living in the vicinity of some technical
universities in cities such as Sydney and Boston rather
than dispersed throughout elite suburbs or rural locations).
Their shape and development is unclear, with extension
beyond informal but private networks through inclusion
of bridges to the internet reflecting factors such as
- perceived
regulatory constraints
- the
cost of commercial internet access
- the
stance of internet service providers regarding linkage
to a wireless intranet.
Major
influences appear to be multi-player gaming and, as discussed
below, what has been characterised as either the 'hacker
ethos' or (less kindly) hobbyists. The US Portland network
indicates that - echoing US comments that Wi-Fi "technology
is both cool and empowering".
Some
community wireless networks have been ephemeral, with
disappearance variously being attributed to personality
differences, the low performance of particular networks
as cheap broadband becomes more available, and even the
'aging' of participants.
'Geek chic' has been evident in home-grown improvement
of existing technologies to allow wireless communication
outside topographical or other constraints on 802.11 transmissions.
The major example - challenging the Pringles can wardriving
motif for media attention - is the cantenna.
Information sharing via the net (in particular through
IRC, email and wiki)
- rather than through print publications - and emulation
of peers has been fundamental to development of freenets.
Face to face contact has, however, been significant. One
forum was the 2004 US Community Wireless Summit.
Among loose national and international projects FreeNetworks.org
is a US-based attempt to bring together community projects
from across the globe -
a volunteer cooperative association dedicated to education,
collaboration, and advocacy for the creation of FreeNetworks.
You can show solidarity and support the cause by building
a network that follows our peering guidelines, and identify
it to your users as a FreeNetwork
Australia and New Zealand
Major freenets in Australia and New Zealand include
New
South Wales
Sydney
Wireless - Sydney
Bathurst Wireless
- Bathurst
Victoria
Melbourne
Wireless - Melbourne
Ballarat
Wireless - Ballarat
Bendigo
Wireless - Bendigo
Geelong Wireless
- Geelong
South Australia
Air-Stream
- Adelaide
Queensland
Brishmesh
- Brisbane
Cairns
Wireless - Cairns
Darling
Downs Wireless - Toowoomba
Tasmania
TasWireless
- Hobart
Western Australia
E3 - Perth
WAFreeNet
- Perth
ACT
Air.Net
- Canberra
NT
Darwin
Wireless - Darwin
New Zealand
NZWireless
wireless grassroots?
Emphasis on community and on 'freedom' has led some participants
to promote the networks as 'freenets', independent of
regulators, commercial values and large commercial service
providers. On occasion that has led to confusion with
initiatives such as the anti-censorship freenet
initiative.
WirelessAnarchy ("WirelessAnarchy has arrived - hide
the kids") thus notes that
WirelessAnarchy
is about creating your own long range infrastructure,
without having to pay anyone or jump through government
hoops. Cheaply and easily, using off the shelf equipment,
and a little ingenuity, you too can create your own
net
In
responding to the question "Why should I join a public
wireless network?" the people at Australian freenet
Melbourne Wireless answer
Because
true freedom comes from the freedom to communicate.
Imagine being able to provide web services, mail services,
games servers, file archives and so on, without having
to worry about phone line charges, exhausting your download
limits and so on, chat and communicate with a collection
of people who want to be able to interconnect their
computers without having to be restrained by the bandwidth
of their connection, or usage and volume limits. It's
possible, but it requires your time, and some expertise.
if you don't have any expertise, you can borrow ours
Mudgee
Wireless Network Initiative notes
that it
consists
of a few people who are sick and tired of the low speed
and high cost involved in playing a couple of games
against each other and sharing a few files, in our local
area. We have decided that we can create a Wireless
LAN in our area for these particular purposes. ...
This is primarily for playing a few LAN games and doing
a bit of file sharing, and any other 'net type applications,
such as real-time video chats, ect.. What makes this
medium so much better is its comparatively high speed,
as compared to what is available in the area, and the
lack of ongoing costs.
... Wireless LANs are taking off because people are
sick and tired of the high costs and unreliability of
broadband Internet in our country, not to mention the
relatively low availability of any services other than
56K dial up.
It comments that
this
is not wireless Internet. If we were to supply wireless
Internet, we would have to become a carrier and get
a carrier license and have all the responsibilities
that go with that. It cost too much to go to that level.
All we are on about it establishing a wireless network,
for gaming, file sharing and communications, while by-passing
the local carriers for our local data
Some
enthusiasts have been inspired by wired community and
municipal freenets of the early 1990s.
Allan Batteau's 1995 The Social Architecture of Community
Computing commented
that
One
form of community computing is the freenet movement,
which has a stronghold in the Midwest and in California.
Freenets are the digital equivalent of public access
channels on cable television,
which is to say that they are not free but rather piggybacked
on top of other storage and processing, where the opportunity
costs are almost free. Freenets are essentially bulletin
board and email systems, in which anybody in a given
territory can subscribe post messages (including commercial
messages) or create a discussion group. Many - perhaps
most- freenets are university or library established
and are used to publicize their services.
Batteau
offered a caution to hyperbole about 'virtual communities'
from Rheingold and others, commenting that
Use
of a freenet requires one to own a computer or travel
to a library or other institution that makes computers
available to the public. One of the earliest freenets
, the Santa Monica Public Access Network, established
kiosks that allowed even the homeless of Santa Monica
to have email addresses. Before the netbozos took over,
this access had some great benefits for Santa Monica:
It improved communication between the homeless and other
residents of the city, allowed those who had been voiceless
to articulate their needs, and led to the creation of
some innovative city services for the homeless. The
ultimate fate of Santa Monica PAN, where a few angry
voices crowded everyone else off the air, is also illustrative
of the limitations of this technology: It created new
public spaces. But like all public spaces, in the absence
of policing (a system administrator or moderator), Gresham's
law took over. Bad tokens drove out good
Similar
cautions come from Peter van den Besselaar's paper
The life and death of the great Amsterdam Digital
City.
Particular municipal governments have considered or begun
to implement plans for large-scale free fibre, wire or
wireless access across central business districts or wider
metropolitan areas. THose plans are explored in the final
page of this note.
studies
There has been surprisingly little writing about the sociology
of wireless community networks, in contrast to the large
literature (albeit much of poor value) on wired freenets.
There is little hard statistical data about the number
of community networks, participation or use.
From a technical perspective two US primers are Rob Flickenger's
Building Wireless Community Networks (Sebastopol:
O'Reilly 2003) and Jack Unger's Deploying License-Free
Wireless Wide-Area Networks (San Francisco: Cisco
Press 2003).
For upbeat views of community networks see Howard Howard
Rheingold's
The Virtual Community (Minerva: London 1994) and
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York:
Perseus 2002), Douglas Schuler's New Community Networks:
Wired for Change (Reading: ACM/Addison-Wesley 1996),
Anne Beamish's Communities On-Line: Community-Based
Computer Networks thesis
or Garth Graham's Freenets and the Politics of Community
in Electronic Networks paper.
Hacking and digital communitarianism is considered in
David Lancashire's 2001 paper
The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development,
Steven Weber's 2000 The Political Economy of Open Source
Software (PDF),
Darren Wershler-Henry's Free as in Speech and Beer:
open source, peer-to-peer and the economics of online
revolution (Toronto: FT/Prentice Hall Canada 2002)
and Pekka Himanen's rather silly The Hacker Ethic &
the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random
House 2001). For a corrective see Thomas Streeter's paper
That Deep Romantic Chasm: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism
& the Computer Culture, Richard Barbrook's influential
1998 paper
The High-Tech Gift Economy and Donald Rosenberg's
Copyleft & the Religious Wars of the 21st Century
(here)
maps and statistics
For local community network access see
Community
Wireless Node Database Project - Australia
Community Wireless Node Database Project - New
Zealand
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