SAN FRANCISCO –– With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations.
About a foot and a half long, the antennas rise from the rooftops of major buildings. The fire station. A white structure that houses a dot-com. A colonel's quarters. The Exploratorium science museum.
Though the salt-and-eucalyptus-tinged air, the poles beam stock quotes, e-mail, news and other data to the laptop computers of any of the 1,800 residents who want it.
"I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."
This anytime, anywhere World Wide Web is the new dream of many technology ventures. Companies such as AT&T Corp., Sprint Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG have been spending billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the wireless world. For now, most consumers can get only slow wireless Internet services by hooking up their cell phones to their computers. In a few years, the telecom giants plan to roll out wireless networks that allow surfing at speeds comparable to that of a faster 56K modem.
What few people know is that alternative wireless technology is available today at far lower cost.
Kahle is using a makeshift network he built along with a couple of other fellow geeks. It's fashioned from scrap electronic parts and off-the-shelf computer cards and cables. The coverage is extremely limited, and it's not 100 percent reliable. But it's three, four, five or more times as speedy as the next-generation "3G" networks the telecommunications giants have planned, fast enough for people to watch Internet videos as if they were on television. And since it uses the public airwaves, no government license is required.
Fans of the technology describe the networks as the wireless equivalent of Napster, the free music-swapping software, or Linux, the free operating system that was built by far-flung volunteers working together over the Internet. Both began as obscure, techies-only products but have become so popular that they threaten the established powers.
It's an idea that's catching on in places like the trendy Capitol Hill district of Seattle and the working-class town of Sommerville, Mass., as well as in Europe and Australia. Recently, airports, hotels and academic institutions--such as Wake Forest University, Carnegie Mellon University and Drexel University--have been experimenting with the same technology to create their own private networks.
Until a few months ago, the equipment to build such local "data clouds" was prohibitively expensive. They were mostly used for one-time events such as county fairs and conventions or in remote areas in places such as Tonga in the Southwest Pacific and the former Soviet republics, where stringing phone lines or laying fiber would take years, if ever, to complete. Thanks to some recent technological breakthroughs that caused the cost of the hardware to plummet, however, a growing number of people are now creating their own personal wireless transmission stations for under $1,000.
The projects often begin with a single person, a desktop computer and a basic fast land-line Internet connection. By hooking that machine up to a wireless transmitter box or "access point," the data is sent via antenna into the air. Anyone with a laptop or computer equipped with a wireless receiver can collect or send signals to surf the Web as long as they are within range of the antenna. The distance can be boosted by using additional antennas to spread the signals.
Many techies such as the Presidio's Kahle allow friends, neighbors and even strangers to piggyback on the wireless connections. All the freeloaders need is a $100 to $150 wireless computer card they can buy at an electronics store. That's it. No set-up charge. No monthly fee. Nada.
The self-proclaimed evangelists of this technology believe that one day thousands of people will embrace this philosophy--creating free, seamless Internet networks in every city in the world, a sort of grass-roots communication system for the masses. They say the free network may one day come to compete with the ones built out by the telecom companies or at least exist alongside them. They imagine that this network will arise out of anarchy, the same way the Internet did several decades ago.
"We can do it again in wireless and take back the communication networks from the closed telecom giants," says Kahle, chief executive of Alexa Internet, a Web archival and reference service.
Others, including representatives from some of the major "telcos" and Yankee Group analyst Sarah Kim, are skeptical. They say the free networks are just a fad and are unlikely to function well in the long-run because the software and hardware that is being used were designed to work indoors.
"City-wide networks are possible but maybe not practical," Kim said. "I don't think anyone imagined this technology being used for this wide of a space."
The project in many ways represents the latest struggle between corporations that want to maintain their dominance of the digital marketplace and the technology-savvy people who believe digital access and information should be collectively owned.
The leaders of this movement run the gumut from junior-high and high-school students to James Stevens, founder of a London company that provides free Net access to poor artists, the homeless and others; to Kahle, a technology luminary who sold his first company to America Online Inc. and the second to Amazon.com Inc.
All this has been possible because of the development of an open, standard wireless technology known as 802.11b. It has allowed people and companies to create their own networks without having to buy the service from the big telecommunications providers. It's the same standard that Apple Computer Inc. made mainstream in mid-1999 with its AirPort, a box that lets users of its iBooks connect to the Internet from their homes without a cable.
In September, Drexel rolled out what is believed to be the largest continuous network using this technology. It allows students and faculty members to get Internet access on its entire campus and beyond--from the Philadelphia train station at 30th Street up through 34th Street. On sunny days, college students can be seen sitting on steps or benches pecking away at their keyboards.
It's a project that Drexel officials say was so cheap and so simple that they're surprised few others have done it.
"It's not rocket science," said John Bielec, university vice president for information resources and technology. "It's new, so there's a lot of mystery, but it's really just a do-it-yourself project."
That may be true, but even the technology's biggest fans acknowledge that they have numerous technical, economic and regulatory hurdles to overcome before their networks become robust enough to compete with the services offered by telecommunications companies.
For one, the coverage is spotty. Most cities have only a half-dozen to a dozen access points, and the signals are so weak that they periodically get blocked by buildings or thick fences. Presidio residents, for instance, can get access to the network in only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the neighborhood. That covers many of the central office buildings, the Burger King and the bowling alley, but not the lookout points where people often go to watch the fog roll over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Tim Pozar, a computer expert who built much of the Presidio network, said he and other volunteers plan to add up to a dozen new access points in the coming year, tripling its reach. He predicts that soon the price of the hardware will fall so that it's just "change that people have in their pocket," and that will solve the problem of the limited coverage area.
But other problems aren't so easily overcome.
The system depends on public airwaves, the 2.4-gigahertz frequency that is shared by cordless phones and microwave ovens and even some streetlights. Harvie Branscomb, who has been conducting a wireless Internet experiment in Aspen, Colo., for four years, described this segment of the skies as "chaos" and said that any or all of those things could jumble the data transmissions or cause a sort of electronic gridlock in the air.
"The technology now demonstrates the possibility but not the fulfillment of the idea," said Branscomb, who directs the project for Sun Microsystems Inc. executive and technology pioneer Bill Joy.
Furthermore, the homemade wireless networks depend on the goodwill--or ignorance--of regulators and Internet service providers. The grass-roots efforts could abruptly collapse if the government overhauls its regulations for use of those airwaves or even if Internet service providers start complaining about multiple people using one account.
The people leading the pushes in each city have started throwing around the idea of asking the Federal Communications Commission to allocate dedicated "spectrum" for nonprofit wireless Internet use--a scenario some industry analysts dismiss as a pipe dream since the agency makes billions of dollars off the sale of such airwaves.
Still, the doubters don't seem to be dampening the enthusiasm of many techies, who are banding together in increasing numbers to improve upon the idea. An engineering student from the University of Washington, for instance, is working on a way to boost the antenna signals. And a team of programmers in Australia is creating more robust software. They share their discoveries with each other on sites such as www.sflan.com,seattlewireless.net, www.pdxwireless.org, www.guerrilla.net and www.consume.net.
One of the leaders of the Seattle effort, Matt Westervelt, a 28-year-old systems administrator for RealNetworks Inc., says the true believers just look at the Internet for inspiration.
"People are saying we're just a bunch of geek types putting up another network for geek types," he said. "But you have to remember that's exactly what they were saying about the Internet a few years ago."
