WiFi networks hold many opportunities to enable, empower and liberate small and large communities from century old monopolies and tight communication control infrastructures. Are we ready to start writing the specifications for this new future?
"...a community WiFi network is anything from 2 houses linking their WiFi together to a full blown multiple AP mesh across a whole village or town. What we're looking for here is something beyond simple internet access.
The key here is to think in terms of what happens when a large group of households are connected at LAN speeds to each other rather than simply connected to the Internet.
We're looking for apps that take advantage of the 10-100 times greater bandwidth of LAN speeds over Internet speeds."
Here are some real possibilities:
- Local VoIP. When your key friends are on the same LAN, why use the phone?
- Burstable bandwidth. Aggregate together the bandwidth of all the Internet connections on the mesh. If you need to download a Linux distribution, you can get a full 20Mbps download for 10 minutes. With some bandwidth shaping this would be transparent and wouldn't affect everyone else. Perhaps it could be scheduled.
- Local multi-user gaming. All the houses in one street can play Unreal Tournament at LAN speeds.
- Peer to Peer backup or a local Backup service. Everybody is bad at backup. Run a community backup service with a big tape jukebox for a minimal fee. The really cool way to do this would be to distribute the backups across spare disk space on all the connected machines with enough crypto to secure it and enough redundancy so you could retrieve your data even if most of the machines were temporarily down.
- Run a community News server. This is really just internet technology but there's some benefits from running internet systems that are only locally available.
- Local web proxy servers. Retrieve web pages at local speeds.
- Hook up some big printers for high volume, high quality printing. Perhaps the local copy shop could offer this as a service.
- Media Servers. We're heading into dangerous territory here! But what happens when music and content are shared but only available on the local LAN. Instead of walking round to my friend's house to borrow a CD I just connect to her shared music folder. Stream whatever's playing on your stereo so that it's not just the next door neighbour who complains about your taste in music. Perhaps the local Video library shop could start streaming 2 or 3 videos.
- High-speed web cams all round the village. A real neighbourhood watch.
Original post at:
Voidstar - Killer Apps For Community Networks
Here's a few ideas, has anyone got any more?
See also:
Beyond Wi-Fi: A New Wireless Age
A wave of intelligent network technologies is sweeping from university and military labs into the marketplace. The innovations are known by various names, including smart antennas, mesh networks, and agile radios -- all of them sharing the same basic breakthroughs in digital signal processing. Business Week
No More Phone Bills: We Can Have OUR Telephone System Now!
New developments in wireless technology have presented communities with an opportunity to banish the phone bill forever and replacing it with a flat rate fee of between £2 - £3 per week.
The system uses the new wireless networking cards (802.16) and modified routers from LocustWorld.com which puts deployment costs at £500 per node."
Robin Good Sharewood Tidings
