International Summit for Community Wireless Networks

Compared to the more professional attendees of other wireless conferences like MuniWireless and W2i, the people at the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks are a ragtag bunch. They do things like walk up to a McDonald's drive-thru window at 2:30 in the morning impersonating a car in the hopes of scoring some late-night food.

But its folks like this that invented wireless networking and, judging by the Summit attendance, they have spread their innovation to every corner of the globe. Their gusto was on clear display at the three-day affair in Columbia, Maryland, May 18-20, but so was a sense that big challenges are on the horizon.

Truly International
This was the third of these summits, but the first one to be truly international. Despite a strong Canadian presence, the first two were National Summits. This year, participants from France, Spain, Croatia, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Ghana, and India brought a lot of new energy. "There's a huge number of synergies happening now with International projects," conference organizer Sascha Meinrath said.

Dillip Pattanaik, Director of Information Resource Management Association-India, was one of the many international participants working to reach poor people in rural areas. "Our model is community ownership and we need low cost solutions," he said, explaining why he traveled such a distance to attend a community wireless conference in the United States.

Kristijan Fabina came from Croatia hoping to learn more about mesh networks, which lets wireless routers connect with each other in order to expand a coverage area. He was also looking to expand his "human network." As a founder of a local wireless community in Zagreb, Croatia, Fabina helped build the Croatian Wireless Association and is now eager to strengthen connections across Europe and the Atlantic.

As project coordinator for WiLAC, an information portal for Latin America and the Caribbean, Sylvia Cadena promotes the use of ICT for development in the region. "The market is there. The interest is there. It's growing. But the language is still a barrier. And access to equipment is a barrier," she said. At the Summit, she was able to connect with researchers from the US and Canada building similar resource centers.

The most remarkable thing about the international participants is that even the ones from the same region had to come all the way to Maryland to meet each other. Now that they've met, expect to see summits like this one in Latin America, Europe, and South Asia. 

From Community to Municipal
While there were still many community network operators from within the United States in attendance, the fastest growing group of domestic participants seems to be advocates around municipal networks. One panel, "Holistic Planning & Deployment of Wireless Networks," moderated by Dana Spiegel from NYCwireless, brought advocates from Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, and New York together to compare their cities' models, with Boston's winning high praise.

The Open Air Boston request for information describes a non-profit network owner that only provides wholesale access, but that does so in such a way that there is practically no barrier to entry for retail service or application providers. (When the portion of the Boston RFI emphasizing the desire for an open source solution was read out loud before the breakout sessions on Sunday, the audience broke into applause.)

This issue of how to address municipal involvement was absent from the first National Summit for Community Wireless Networks in 2004 for the simple reason that cities had not yet gone very far down the wireless path.

In the session on "research agenda," the discussants grappled with this transformation from, as Alison Powell put it, a "technological object which was constructed as being disruptive and part of a disruptive social system" to a tool of governments and corporations