8.3 The Future

With support from all over the globe, community wireless projects are bringing people together to build a communications network focused on utility, not profit. This project has brought more geeks out from behind their computer screens than any other I've encountered . These people are moved to get out, meet their neighbors, and build something new out of a simple desire to communicate with each other. From every indication, the community wireless network seems to be an idea whose time has finally come.

Chapter 9. Radio Free Sebastopol

My first brush with 802.11b networking in the summer of 2000 demonstrated something very clear to me, even then: it was obvious that wireless connectivity was going to be a tremendously important technology. In the next few years , hundreds of local community wireless groups and commercial ventures have sprung up, building usable networks over the air using 802.11 technology. This is the story of how an idea to make our corporate network more flexible has evolved, and has become part of a worldwide movement to provide ubiquitous wireless network access.

9.1 OSCON 2000

My initial introduction to wireless networking was in Monterey, California, at OSCON (Open Source Conference) 2000. O'Reilly arranged free public wireless access for conference attendees. The tremendous flexibility of being able to connect to the network from anywhere led to all sorts of interesting, unforeseen interactions. For example, people attending a large talk could converse in real time over IRC and discuss the talk (and even critique the speaker) without raising their voices. They could use the Net as a resource when asking the speaker questions, to draw out very interesting points by way of real-time examples. With an instant messaging client, ubiquitous wireless made an effective, free, two-way paging system. (Rather than trying to use the overloaded PCS phone system, it was now possible to send a quick "Where do you want to meet for lunch ?" message, and get a response back instantly.) Conference attendees no longer had to return to their hotel rooms for dialup access, or be banished to a terminal room away from where the action was, just to check their email or refer to a web page. That was assuming , of course, that one had an 802.11b card and laptop handy. Personally, I had to wrestle a card away from a buddy who happened to have a spare. I realized that networking on borrowed time wouldn't cut it; I simply had to pack my own.

On returning from OSCON, there was much interest at O'Reilly in getting wireless networking going at the office. If that much flexibility could be put in place for very low cost, why weren't we using it in-house? If conference-goers could use the stuff to grill speakers for information more effectively, what could it do for our company meetings and presentations? And so, without even knowing my Direct Sequence from my Spread Spectrum, I started down the long, winding path of wireless networking.

9.2 The Campus

After setting up a couple of access points to cover our campus, and a crash course in WEP, MAC filtering, and closed networks, our fledgling 802.11b network was up. With relatively little effort and expense (about $3000 and a few hours work in all), we now had seamless coverage in all three of our buildings, complete with roaming between APs. At the time, the main O'Reilly offices in Sebastopol consisted of three two-story buildings , covering an area about 450 by 150 feet. Using one Lucent AP-1000 in each building, and a small 5db omni at each AP, I was able to cover nearly all of the offices and conference rooms.

Early on in the process, one of our users noticed that she couldn't get online, even though she had a very strong signal. Upon checking her network settings, I realized that she hadn't set her ESSID, and was therefore associating with any available network. It just so happened that the network with the strongest signal was coming from the business next door! I fired up Lucent's Site Map tool, and, sure enough, there was an existing 802.11b network immediately next door. After a quick conversation with their sysadmin, we decided on a channel numbering scheme that would minimize interference between the two networks. (This is exactly why a preliminary site survey is so important: even though you may not see antennas, a network may already exist in your area! Don't just assume that since wireless is new to you, it's new to your part of town.)

Now that our offices were saturated with access, with 50+ users up and happily untethered, what could we do with it next? Naturally, more than a few eyes turned to the hotel and coffee shop across the street. If one could get a signal from the hotel, then visiting employees who stayed there could get online for free, at 11Mbps (as opposed to paying per minute for a trickle of dialup access). And of course, being able to work directly from the coffee shop must do something for productivity. With visions of mochas and bandwidth dancing in my head, I looked into adding external antennas to increase our range.