San Francisco's Got Free Wi-Fi

Carpoolio writes "If you're living in San Francisco, chances are you can connect, for free, to the BARWN -- the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. BARWN broadcasts an 802.11 signal from the top of a big hill near San Francisco, and anyone with a clear sight line to the signal can connect. Another set of wireless nodes are being placed around town by SFLan, making Wi-Fi available to tens of thousands of people."

Overloaded?

[AKnightCowboy]

Wow, that must be some magic access point. Mine can only handle about 30 people before it's saturated. How did they overcome that limitation of 802.11b?

WiFi VOIP

[tobes]

It'll be nice when things like this become ubiquitous and someone starts manufacturing WiFi "cell" phones that use Vonnage or some such thing.

It's been my experience that iChat has near cell sound quality, so having a small hardware iChat (or whatever you use) client with 802.11b access would be pretty sweet.

SBC Surrenders.

[tinrobot]

So, does this mean people in SF can cancel their broadband connections and go 100% WiFi?

IP addressing?? How?

[Anonymous Coward]

And with these many people connecting, how is he handling IP addressing? Doesn't say anything about a dhcp server or NAT etc.....

Does anyone benchmark these?

[vudufixit]

Look, no one should complain about a "free" connection, but I'm curious to know how fast the typical user's connection really is. After all, the access point has to be connected to a terrestrial data line, which has limited bandwidth. Of course, the more people find out about this, the slower it gets for everybody, right? Does anyone know if those who provide "free" wireless access have an upgrade plan to handle the additional traffic?

Ganging APs for more WiFi bandwidth

[G4from128k]

It would seem that if you have a clear line of sight to multiple APs, then you could combine them and have more bandwidth than a single AP-channel connection would provide. A ganged, multi-AP setup would use directional antennas to talk to each AP without collisions. Such a setup would also help if one AP were overloaded or down for some reason. The only problem would be if all the APs you talk to were routed through some narrow pipe somewhere in the network.

Monetize THIS!

[Saeger]

"Tim says he set up the network because he wants to give Internet access to people who can't afford or access it, especially people living in Third World countries or depressed areas of other countries."

The thing about free wireless (that I love) is that it keeps the Ashcroft-types up at night worrying about anonymous "terrorist" freespeech, and it gives the telco-types and the WISP-wannabes the middleman middle finger.

Community owned and operated, adhoc wireless mesh networking [wired.com] will be the future of free ubiquitous access despite some peoples early attempts to coopt it. It's similar to how FedEx thought they could own the Fax business [shirky.com] in the 80s. Can't blame 'em for trying I guess.

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Not really new news...

[faedle]

But, hats off to yet another group of intrepred geeks. San Francisco has been a hotbed of free WiFi service for quite some time, be it organized efforts like the aformentioned SFlan or ad-hockery created by people setting up intentionally open WiFi nodes in their homes and businesses.

When I lived in SF, I got in a heated debate with a guy named Scott regarding whether all of this 802.11 ad-hockery was stealing from the phone company. He was largely a troll, never really arguing any points directly and shifting focus: but you can see the results at my website [moremayo.com]. He's even come back way after the fact and submitted comments in my comment section.

The reason I bring up this discussion is because I think Scott's misconceptions about what people are doing with 802.11 open access points brings up a serious issue. Read what he has to say: and read between the lines for the greater position that he stands behind. It's a scary thought to consider that people believe that the phone companies have a right to make money, regardless of how badly they mishandle their markets.

Re:Monetize THIS!

[anthony_dipierro]

Community owned and operated, adhoc wireless mesh networking will be the future of free ubiquitous access despite some peoples early attempts to coopt it.

Nope, mesh networking (as described in your link, anyway) will never be free. Someone has to pay for those "stems reaching into the Internet," after all. The current system of semi-centralization is much more efficient than a mesh network. You run a bunch of connections to a central location, then you run a single big connection between those locations. The telephone network wasn't built this way by accident. It was built this way because it is the most efficient way to do things. Sure, wireless is cheaper than wires, but it still costs money to both set up the point to point links (I know you're not talking about broadcast links), and to send the actual data (think electricity costs).

Re:Not for much longer...

[Saeger]

There's no reason routers (wireless or not) have to be so stupid.

Throttle the connections based on a moving average of bandwidth usage, then your average Joe can get his email @ max speed, and your average Jane can download her 100MB of wedding pictures @ medium speed, but Johnny 24/7 Pirate will stuck at the remaining capacity (slow) speed.

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Lies

[MrCawfee]

This lies, i have line of site to twin peaks and i can't connect, it's all lies! but i can connect to my neighbors open ap called "default"

legalities

[null-sRc]

what are the legal implications in the event of malicious activities performed over such a open network.

ie:

- child porn downloading / trading ?
- will the riaa sue for all the mp3's downloaded ?
- an anonymous way to spam ?
- etc :D

unfortunatly a few bad apples always ruin the party for the rest of us. :(

taking care of illegals?

[matth]

So exactly how are they planning on dealing with hackers and the like? Sounds like a great place to hack from! Get on.. do your stuff.. get off!

Re:P2P on public WIFI

[timeOday]

Of course this could also be a haven for computers that don't have the latest patches, have print/file sharing enabled, and don't have personal firewalls activated.

No more so than the wired Internet. (And what is a "personal" firewall?)