‘Free as the air we breathe’ Could a United Kingdom model for digital community networking be applied in South Africa? Sean Dodson Using an aerial, a lightning conductor, a floppy disk and a microwave transceiver little bigger than a credit card, a pair of techies are hoping to beat the world’s big telecommunication companies and launch the first broadband wireless Internet in the United Kingdom. James Stevens and Julian Priest of Consume.net represent a growing group of people who believe that the Internet should be as free as the air we breathe and they are planning to make it so. Everyone, they say, should have the right to access to the Internet because the Net is too valuable a thing to be owned by small groups of organisations, that is, the big telecommunications companies. They believe that the network should be owned by its users, and it should be free. The current economic and regulatory framework is too slow, they say, and too expensive and is the cause of what is now being called the “digital divide”.
The scheme will be piloted later this month in Shoreditch, east London. It involves the creation of a “data cloud” a wireless Internet network distributed through the radio spectrum. The technology is already commercially available and, as long as the network is used on a non-commercial basis, no licences will be needed, say the pair. Stevens says: “We have already established three sites for antennas or nodes which are omnidirectional send-and-receive stations. Once people have the wireless cards in their laptops they will be able to connect with our networks.”
These first three nodes, adds Stevens, are enough to generate a data cloud. The right cards for laptops are called 802.11 or wireless Ethernet and are available from companies like Lucent Technologies for as little as 150 (about R1?700). Of course, the pair cannot build a network on their own. So last month they invited others to participate in its building and design. The response so far has been promising. Nearly 400 have already joined the mailing list. These include the chief executive of a leading UK Internet service provider and several high-end technologists. Already, another node is being developed in north London, and web designer Medium Rare is building its own at London Bridge. The pair say that anyone can set up a node and that it can cost as little as R4?000. The initial nodes will rely on connections to the “outside” Internet which will still have to be paid for. But the pair see no reason why the network cannot stand alone once it has grown big enough. The idea for the network began in 1995. Then, Stevens had just co-founded Lateral, one of the UK’s first web-design agencies. Lateral was leasing a 2-megabyte connection from a business park in north London at a cost of R2-million a year. Stevens found that he was using a mere quarter of the bandwidth and wanted to redistribute the spare capacity to the other creative groups in his neighbourhood. One of those groups was Medium Rare, whose technical director is Julian Priest. The trouble was that they were housed in the building opposite and it is illegal to string a cable across a street in the UK. So Priest went out and bought a pair of microwave transponders for R3?500, similar to those found in mobile phones, and hooked up to Lateral’s bandwidth with a wireless connection. The pair say that the idea for a city-wide network came from there. “The whole environment of communications is very tightly controlled. Because that’s where the power is, especially these days,” says Priest. “That’s the reason why we couldn’t hang a wire across the street. “The good thing about what we are doing now is that you don’t need planning permission to build our network. And you don’t need a licence.” This is because they plan to operate on the part of the radio spectrum usually used by CB enthusiasts. The data cloud, they say, is not the Internet for free, but the Internet in return for participation. Although the protocols are still to be thrashed out, they will give access only to those prepared to build a node. The nodes work by both transmitting and receiving large amounts of data. This means that those participating in the creation of the data cloud are effectively sharing bandwidth. So, although technically feasible, simply buying the correct PC card will not be enough. Beyond that, the group hopes to connect local networks and get backbones between local networks running under its own rules. Similar networks are already under way in Sweden and the United States. Consume is constructing a legal framework that will be built into its software that will define how resources should be shared, “both inside and outside the network”, says Stevens.
To Stevens in particular who for years ran Backspace, the UK’s first digital access space the point of all this is to allow people to produce their own media. “This has been possible for some time,” he says. “But the missing link has always been the issue of connectivity. It is easy to stream media between two people, but to stream to 10 people is already beyond the bandwidth of most users. So we have stepped in to give people the idea that it is within their own capabilities to develop a network of their own.”
It was because of this desire that they got fed up waiting for the big telcos to get their wireless networks together. Also, the government’s auction of bandwidth has driven the price up to a point where any successful bidder will have to make so much money out of it that the chances of a fast cheap public access network emerging are virtually nil. At no point do they ever mention the desire to make any money from Consume they operate as a strictly non-profit organisation. “We are just trying to build in the scraps of what’s left,” says Priest. “But we believe that there is more than enough. And if we can populate the space with free public access networks then we might even provide some competition for the big telecommunications companies.”