Tuesday 19 February 2008

Guerilla Wireless Internet

I'm sure it's been tried somewhere around the world by now. Some local governments and councils have occasionally announced plans to build a public wireless internet service, and all of these plans have fallen through. If a few tech-savvy citizens got together, they could easily buy a business-targeted internet plan and distribute it wirelessly over a local area, splitting the bill among everyone who uses it.

That would probably be the biggest problem: billing. Besides that, the technical problems are practically nil.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But billing does count for a lot.
PPS - Especially if access is not restricted.

4 comments:

Erin Marie said...

Somewhat random and unrelated, but I just had a picture of a gorilla sitting there with a headset on playing WoW.

John said...

I think I saw that at the zoo once, but the headset was a watermelon, and instead of playing WoW he was eating.

Neil Rodrigues said...

I thought about doing something similar many times. Not so much so that everyone had an internet connection. More to the point so that the people who used it would not be tracked. A community wireless system that did not keep record of the history of the people who used it. Perhaps even something that had connections (forums, blogs, chat on the system) that were completely darkweb. Honestly I am surprised that this sort of thing did not happen more often.

John said...

That does sound like a good idea, though not tracking users and deciding who pays might be cross-purpose goals. I also like the idea of highly local content in forums, blogs and chat.