The following March, I took a trip to Seattle. My brother was moving to the area, so I took the opportunity to travel with him up north to see the Seattle Wireless network for myself . I must admit that I wasn't fully prepared (psychologically) for what I found when I got there. Here were a bunch of very sharp sysadmins , programmers, and net monkeys , who were gearing up to build a redundant, fully routed public network, independent of the Internet. They were working on this project entirely in their spare time , with no promise of reward other than the joy of hacking out a project that simply needed to be done. They weren't just hooking up a couple of APs and trusting their luck; they had an entire network topology planned, a hardware solution down, and nodes in the works to connect sites miles apart. I spent a day building antennas and speculating about the possibilities of 802.11b with the SWN crowd . By the end of the day, we managed to put together a yagi made out of washers , some tubing, a bolt, and a pie tin that carried an 11Mbps signal about a mile. The topography of Seattle is such that their network plans will probably work: tall buildings , rolling hills, and limited tree cover makes much of the city accessible ( assuming one can get on top of the hills). I went back to Sebastopol with a couple of important realizations:
Ironically, it started to look like it would be easier to get the entire Sebastopol area unplugged with open network access, rather than try to connect a few users to a private network. But to do that, I certainly couldn't do all of the work. I needed to find out if there was as much interest in my area as there seemed to be in the rest of the country. |