dailywireless.org » Doc Searls on NYC Wireless

Doc Searls on NYC Wireless

Doc Searls writing in Linux Journal, has a great article about Community LANs. In fact the whole September issue (#113) is devoted to wireless. It includes articles on Discovering Wireless Networks, The Open Source Development Lab and Linux-Powered Wireless Hot Spots.

Community groups, startup companies and even the phone company are using Linux to make New York City into one big happy wireless network hot spot. How is your town doing?
Some public Wi-Fi efforts are largely municipal. That’s the case with Long Beach, California, which provides a large public “hot zone” in its downtown and another at its airport. Other efforts are driven by technically savvy volunteers, such as in Austin, London, Perth, Seattle, San Francisco and many other places. Companies also are doing their part. In Asheville, North Carolina, Natural Communications offers a public hot spot called the BeamPost. New York, however, is a different breed. It’s all the above.
In May, New York’s City Council issued a staff report that recommends a restructuring of the city’s fractured broadband procurement methods, a new fiber/wireless metropolitan area network (MAN) and public Wi-Fi networks. As an example of the latter, it says a potential Prospect Park Wi-Fi network would cost $192,000 US to create but little to maintain.
That report opens with special thanks to Anthony Townsend, who is also a research scientist at NYU’s Taub Urban Research Center, where he has produced a pile of wise and seminal papers about the growth of the Internet in urban settings. Terry Schmidt’s job is turning Anthony’s vision into reality. Terry is Emenity’s CTO and the hacker behind Pebble Linux, the stripped-down Debian used in NYCwireless access points…