Monday, March 3, 2003

1. NONPROFIT TECHNOLOGY NEWS AND EVENTS Low-Income Housing Goes Wireless A project aims to span the "digital divide" between impoverished Americans and those with easy access to technology. http://www.techsoup.org/btc.cfm?file=news_article.cfm&;newsid=1185 8:07:02 PM     Study: more Americans learning about Wi-Fi Study: more Americans learning about Wi-Fi 28 February 2003 -- Wireless Fidelity or Wi-Fi may still be a fuzzy term to a majority of Americans, but according to research company Ipsos, tech-savvy consumers, are already using the technology in their homes, and the total number of users is expected to increase by almost 50 percent in the next six months alone.  Ipsos conducted telephone interviews with more than 1,000 adults between January 21-23, 2003. The findings show four in 10 (41%) respondents are aware of the term Wi-Fi. Of these, more than a third (38%) are at least somewhat familiar with the technology.  Among respondents familiar with Wi-Fi, 13 percent have a Wi-Fi network at home (representing 3% of the general population). An additional 14 percent of the respondents aware of Wi-Fi said they were likely to purchase a Wi-Fi system in the next six months, which translates into a 50 percent increase in Wi-Fi adoption.  But the study also shows while over half of those familiar with Wi-Fi understand its key benefits -- namely speed surpassing broadband and ease of home installation -- many are concerned or uncertain about home installation cost, as well as network security. Also, two-fifths are unsure if there is a Wi-Fi access point close enough to their home*.  http://www.ipsos-reid.com/media/dsp_displaypr_us.cfm?id_to_view=1750 ; * [editorial comment:  huh?] 7:47:32 PM     Cory Doctorow's notes on a session at the Berkeley Spectrum conference on... Community Networks with Brewster Kahle, Tim Pozar and Brett Glass Brewster "Internet Archive" Kahle sets up a talk about the community wireless movement. Tim "BAWUG/SFLAN" Pozar sets up town-wide open WiFi. Brett Glass talks about Seattle's community wireless. Brewster: I live in an underserved area: San Francisco, CA. We create huge libraries that we can't get to anybody. We have terrible bandwidth times. I've built a library larger than the LoC. I've built a video library bigger than NBC's. But without bandwidth, it's all stuck. I've been trying to solve this for six years. This kit -- like the kit PCs that preceded the Apple ][ -- is going up on a tower on the Presidio tomorrow. I will be able to move 3Mbs over that link -- DVD quality video. It's Moore's Law: we're gonna pay the same amount next year and get twice as much. It's something we'll never get out of the telco dudes -- they're raising costs on our sucky 500k lines. 2.4GHz isn't good enough. We built the Internet on protocols, not property regulation. Spectrum reform can be done without ownership. The San Francisco council wouldn't let us put free WiFi on the poles -- nobody in the Parks Service ever got fired for not doing anything. We're offering free 100Mbs in San Francisco to seed the network. Tim Pozar: Intro to community wireless nets. We want to leverage a low-cost last-mile, and not have to pay $40 a month to a crappy telco for a crappy DSL link -- networks don't even have to connect to the Internet! They can connect to each other, to join neighborhoods together. The city and public benefit because it helps people get involved in their neighborhoods and get to know each other. It addresses digital divide issues -- far beyond the stupid crappy terminals in your library. It extends service to neighborhoods that are too far from the CO and to homes that can't afford $50/month. It provides data for public safety workers -- 57,000 percent faster than what the cops and firemen use for data today, and provides parallel infrastructure in the event of the collapse of a central point of failure (i.e. the WTC, which hosted the repeater for the NYPD). The FCC have abdicated its responsibility to regulate the last copper mile, leaving the Bells with no competitive pressure -- this is a non-monopolized last-mile that will keep them honest. It's an experimental testbed for public and commercial use. Provides for community access to news reporting -- for example, the BBC's Day of Protest photoblog. (Ed: Missed a bunch -- bathroom break) LARIAT is a community ISP in Laramie, WY, running since 1993, started with 900MHz wireless. access. Not a Freenet, but a Cheapnet, for sustainability. The dialup is $5.15/month (one hour's work at minimum wage). High-tech biz stays in Laramie because it's got Internet infrastructure. Masts are made out of galvanized pipe and guy-wires. We use wire-line from Qwest, who hate us, but had to provide us because of FCC regs, which have gone away. We're screwed. When lariat was four years old, the Laramie PUC acquired a Ricochet franchise, and announced that it would put up Ricochet access-points that were engineered to stomp on competing radio signals, and only ran at one percent of LARIAT's speed. The PUC execs wouldn't even talk with LARIAT. LARIAT wrote to city council, went to the papers, etc. It worked. But without regulated etiquette, this is a potential disaster. Discuss posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:06 permanent link to this entry We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation. Again, no rest for the hungry and spectrally obsessed -- we're getting (really interesting) talks through dinner: WiFi and Indian Tribes; Community Networks; and a political overview. The reps from Brown Eyed Communications, an org that provides WiFi on Indian reservations, are Canadian. David Joyce is the COO and Gary Anaquod is CTO. (Ed: On several occasions today, we've heard that the big problem with a commons approach to spectrum allocation is that we don't have any experimental data on the success of the commons; commons advocates reply that the regulatory framework makes it impossible to try an experiment -- but Indian land is sovereign and potentially not subject to radio regulation from the CRTC or the FCC). David: We don't call ourselves "Indians" -- we say "First Nations." That will be important later. Nine days ago, we were installing a 20 mi. shot wireless link from a small town in rural Saskatachewan. We installed it for Health Canada, which will bring telemedecine services into a remote community. That's the goal: to spread WiFi to rural communities in Canada and get to the unserved/underserved regions. It's out last (twenty) mile answer. There's more value here than economic value -- there's social value, too. We're a for-profit org, we want to make money, but we want to do it through accomplishing social value (something that wasn't mentioned much here today). There are 72 First Nations communities in SK, and 600 in Canada -- it's a big job to get links to all those communities. Many of these communities live in third-world conditions. I walk around the streets in Silicon Valley and I see prosperity all around me -- I want to see that back home. We understand that there is a technology that can address some of these issues. We believe that broadband is a potential equalizer. Introducing a phone to a rural town can double the income of each farmer by making them an active participant in the local economy. Many settlements in rural SK didn't have basic phone service until three years ago. Unemployment on the rez is at 80 percent. Good communications can change life on the rez. Forget basic phone-service, we want VoIP. The monopolistic telco is a formidable opponent. We consider ourselves young Jedi. The telco needs to contend with more than our little company -- they have to contend with their own inertia. The bust has affected them considerably. There's a lot of dead weight in that company, highly paid people who shouldn't be. We visited the CTO of the Provincial telco and it was quite a shock to us, for in front of the VP of Marketing, the CTO said, "WiFi -- we've met with them." This is the kind of technologist who rises to the top of a Crown Corporation. We offered to build the last mile and share ownership, but they weren't interested. They want to muscle us out -- they're like a dinosaur, a T-Rex. Unlike them, we have not inherited the cost of supporting a crumbling legacy communications system. Now onto the question of spectrum, sovereignty and jurisdiction: wireless comms is not new to First Nations -- you've heard of smoke-signals? It wasn't the smoke, it was EM radiation -- free-space optics -- firelight. The bandwidth requirements weren't quite as high then. And just like a WiFi AP, they needed to be up high and line-of-sight. Jurisdiction isn't a new issue either -- we've been negotiating rights (fishing, hunting, minerals, etc) forever, and scrapping with the Feds over resources is bred into us. When the first gaming casino was established on a reserve, a SWAT team took the chief away in chains. A decade later, gaming is an accepted way of bringing prosperity to the reservation. That's how you get things done in Indian Country. The New Zealand Maori won 25 percent of the spectrum away from the 3G licensors, within the Commonwealth. We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation. It's about capacity building, R&D, self-determination, access and choice. We've made accomplishments in this area, and we will make a difference. The Constitutional status of First Nations communities in Canada means that we'll have some time in the ring. We're reaching out to other indigenous people around the world -- we want to see this replicated abroad. We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation. With these technologies deployed successfully, other communities will look like cave-dwellers by comparison. That's kind of ironic. Gary: We already own our homes and mineral rights and so forth in commons. We have traditional mechanisms for resolving issues of scarcity in the commons. Discuss posted by Cory Doctorow at 22:59 permanent link to this entry 7:25:30 PM     Wireless Mesh Networks [Slashdot] Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday March 01, @08:59AM from the more-nodes-per-capita dept. Roland Piquepaille writes "Robert Poor is CTO of Ember Corporation. He contends that point-to-point or point-to-multipoint networks typical of industrial wireless communications systems have limited scalability and reliability. 'In contrast, wireless mesh networks are multihop systems in which devices assist each other in transmitting packets through the network, especially in adverse conditions. You can drop these ad-hoc networks into place with minimal preparation, and they provide a reliable, flexible system that can be extended to thousands of devices.' The article is pretty technical and contains several illustrations and a case study about the deployment of a wireless mesh network in a water treatment plant. Check this column for Poor's conclusions or read this Sensors article if you have more time." 6:55:46 PM     P2P doesn't hurt record sales. Analysts Ipsos-Reid has just completed a comprehensive study of music downloading, a study whose results put a lie to the recording industry's claims that P2P filesharing nets are harming their business. Check out this interview with an Ipsos-Reid research director: * Over 50% of teenagers download music. * About two-thirds of teenage boys download music * Surprisingly, teenagers are the most receptive demographic toward the concept of paying for online services. * Surprisingly, downloaders appear to buy more CDs Link [Boing Boing Blog] [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]] 6:44:23 PM

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