Making a strong WiFi Community
What community WiFi can learn from hams. Here's an interesting piece about ham radio operators stepping in to help out emergency services, recovery and relief during the blackout. The hams are brilliant at this. They view themselves as being beholden to the public interest, in exchange for the use of the spectrum that they chat on.
The really fascinating thing about this is how well it works politically. Every time there's a disaster, the hams pitch in, and then a Congresscritter gets up on its hind legs and reads a commendation for America's brave and selfless amateur radio operators into the record.
And then, whenever the FCC gets an idea that it could make a couple billion dollars by auctioning off the hams' spectrum to cellular companies, the hams pack the hearings and the comments with commendations from congresscritters from every party and every district. This is powerful mojo.
The most interesting thing about the community WiFi projects like SFLan and Personal Telco is that to the extent that they get adopted by emergency services workers and used in disaster relief (the way that NYC Wireless's WiFi was used by lower Manhattanites after 9-11), WiFi activists can amass an enormous amount of political clout. Open spectrum radios are even better than hams for coordinating disaster relief, I think -- and there's nothing more politically compelling, it seems, than heroism in times of trouble.
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