Community VoIP and Wireless Efforts Face Goliaths

Whether you're miles into the country or thirty stories up in a high-rise, there are advantages to shared access. At eTel, speakers touched upon how communities can share these resources to improve their own access while reducing cost:

Brian Capouch, a computer science professor from St. Joseph's College, is addressing the challenges of the "rankly rural" - and he doesn't mean residents from a small town, he means those who live literally miles into the country. The hurdles these individuals must face in obtaining online services include:

• There aren't very many rural residents, so there aren't many advocates and there isn't any political power
• 3000 users spread over 1500 square miles is extremely low density - and that represents 100% market saturation
• Many users have accepted that they simply will never get Internet access, and therefore don't know anything about using it

Capouch is using a cheap, open source approach to bring VoIP (and Internet) to these rural residents. He's created the Indiana Farm Net, a wireless voice network built from scratch. While he's happy to handle small challengers (the ants that get into his access points), his clear-voiced frustration with large challengers (the telcos that try to squash his community efforts) earned him the longest, loudest round of applause of the conference so far.

Ejovi Nuwere from FON described a similar approach, but in this case, the model is being used to create shared network access in more urban and suburban areas. In FON's utopia, all individuals would share their WiFi hotspot as a member of a community in which all members shared their hotspots. For example, you share (with assurances about security) your home hotspot with the FON community. Then, when you are downtown or out of state, you use someone else's hotspot.

Nuwere's approach is a fascinating (and very ambitious) approach to this problem, and hats off to his effort to organize and mobilize an international community of hotspot owners. If you check out FON's web site for collaborators, you see many of the usual suspects for bottom-up communities, from Dan Gillmor to Ethan Zuckerman.

Both Nuwere and Capouch cited mobile operators and telcos as the goliaths threatening their projects. In both situations, incumbents have invested in lobbying and other activities intended to limit what these grassroots efforts are trying to accomplish.

Tags: christine herron space jockeys spacejockeys voip technology fon telephony o'reilly etel grassroots muni wifi muni wireless farmnet