Building Wireless Community Networks

How Cooperatives Are Making It Happen

The difficulties of a commercial approach to wireless access exist because of a single social phenomenon: the customer is purchasing a solution and is therefore expecting a reasonable service for their money. In a commercial venture, the WISP is ultimately responsible for upholding their end of the agreement or otherwise compensating the customer.

The “last mile” problem has a very different outlook if each member of the network is responsible for keeping his own equipment online. Like many ideas whose time has come, the community wireless network phenomenon is unfolding right now, all over the planet.^[3] People who have been fed up with long lead times and high equipment and installation costs are pooling their resources to provide wireless access to friends, family, neighbors, schools, and remote areas that will likely never see broadband access otherwise. As difficult as the WISP nightmare example has made this idea sound, people everywhere are learning that they don’t necessarily need to pay their dues to the telco to make astonishing things happen. They are discovering that it is indeed possible to provide very high bandwidth connections to those who need it for pennies—not hundreds of dollars—a month.

Of course, if people are going to be expected to run a wireless gateway, they need access either to highly technical information or to a solution that is no more difficult than plugging in a connector and flipping a switch. While bringing common ...