Free High Speed Wireless Connections

from the growing...-slowly... dept

Wed, Aug 15th 2001 10:46am — Mike Masnick

The Village Voice has discovered what many people have already known about for quite some time. There are a bunch of grassroots movements to set up free wi-fi networks around major cities. Of course, being the Village Voice, they focus on the one in NYC without talking about how this has been going on much longer in other places. The article, though, does point out a number of the problems with such networks - and even mentions that it might violate some broadband agreements from cable and DSL providers. While I continue to complain about the disappearance of Ricochet - such a solution would be great if it were only widespread. Any solution that only works in various random "pockets" is never going to be that useful for most people.

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Derek Kerton (profile), 15 Aug 2001 @ 2:02pm

Pockets might be okay...
Mike, Coverage that only exists in certain pockets is fine, so long as the pockets are where you need them. Heck, that's what celluar phone service is, especially in the early 90s.

Question is, who provides 802.11b services where you need them, and is their an easy way to access and pay for the services -- or will there be scads of new accounts and registrations to contend with...
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Mike (profile), 15 Aug 2001 @ 3:10pm

Re: Pockets might be okay...
Well, the point of most of these systems is that they're free... set up by hobbyists, so you don't have to deal with those questions.

You make a good point about the pockets when it comes to cellular service - but even then a single "pocket" was generally fairly large. These pockets are things like "the street corner of main and 6th".
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