Building Wireless Community Networks, Second Edition

Seattle Wireless

The following March, I took a trip to Seattle. My brother was moving to the area, so I took the opportunity to travel with him up north to see the Seattle Wireless network for myself. I must admit that I wasn’t fully prepared (psychologically) for what I found when I got there. Here were a bunch of very sharp sysadmins, programmers, and net monkeys, who were gearing up to build a redundant, fully routed public network, independent of the Internet. They were working on this project entirely in their spare time, with no promise of reward other than the joy of hacking out a project that simply needed to be done. They weren’t just hooking up a couple of APs and trusting their luck; they had an entire network topology planned, a hardware solution down, and nodes in the works to connect sites miles apart.

I spent a day building antennas and speculating about the possibilities of 802.11b with the SWN crowd. By the end of the day, we managed to put together a yagi made out of washers, some tubing, a bolt, and a pie tin that carried an 11Mbps signal about a mile. The topography of Seattle is such that their network plans will probably work: tall buildings, rolling hills, and limited tree cover makes much of the city accessible (assuming one can get on top of the hills). I went back to Sebastopol with a couple of important realizations:

• There was tremendous interest in high-speed wireless networking, even among people who already had high-speed wired access. Ubiquitous wireless ...