Steve Wilton, president of Wireless Nomad Co-op, Toronto

Toronto is one of two Canadian cities (the other is Calgary) that has expressed possible interest in participating in Intel's Digital Communities initiative. According to Anand Chandrasekher, vice-president and director of Intel sales and marketing group, speaking at a recent teleconference, the two cities in Canada "are at varying stages of engagement."

However, when it comes to Toronto, the city's government is taking cautious baby steps to feel out possible municipal involvement in wireless. Earlier this year the city issued an RFP to install a single public access hotspot in the square in front of city hall. This will be in operation for a few months before the end of the year. After that, the city plans to look at the business case to determine if service warrants extending the hot spot beyond the trial period and whether to develop further hotspots in a few locations in the city.

The snail's pace of the city's plunge into the municipal wireless arena is one factor that has prompted Wi-Fi activists in the city to launch their own community wireless initiatives.

One grass-roots group, Wireless Toronto, has launched several hotspots in restaurants and now just fired up its first high-profile hotspot at Toronto's landmark St. Lawrence Market. Public access is free at all of these locations and it is the hotspot sponsors --usually businesses wanting to attract customers -- that pay for set up and monitoring as well as the wireless router. Additionally, they must also provide some form of high-speed Internet access themselves.

It is the same approach that many groups involved in setting up fledgling wireless community projects have adopted with mixed results, going back to the earliest days of community wireless. One example is the wireless "free-networking" Consume project in London England, which was launched in 2000 and subsequently, received much media attention. It is still in operation today, but no on the scale its founders originally envisioned.

"The original idea of Consume was to create a metropolitan meshed network that would link users at the edge of the network together into a coherent local infrastructure," said Consume co-founder Julian Priest in a study published last year, The State of Wireless London. "This connection would allow collective bargaining for backhaul bandwidth, and a free local infrastructure that could support local content and an autonomous media."

While there was considerable activity by Consume's key tech-savvy volunteers, what emerged was not a managed or ad-hoc meshed network. The core problem was one of density. Even after several years, not enough people were participating in the free-networking project for local interconnection to occur.

So Consume took the only approach available -- have many of the nodes connect to the Internet through a DSL connection. "This treats network access as a service like electricity or water," Priest explained in his report. "It is a centralized resource that is distributed outwards to 'consumers' at the edge of the network. As the gatekeeper is the telco providing the ADSL connection, these networks are in effect extensions of the telco provider network rather than an alternative to it. While these networks are often offered for free for public use by their owners, this is often in breach of ADSL providers terms and conditions and as such these networks are susceptible to legal challenges (as has happened in the US), and price control."

The problems that Consume ran into -- simply not enough nodes to make the system work as they hoped -- seems to be common