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
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.
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 covering entire
municipal areas.
"I don't know how what people were doing in 2002 or 2003 became Philadelphia and then became every city in the world wanting to do this," said Anthony Townsend, co-founder of NYCwireless and now with the Institute for the Future.
Harold Feld from the Media Access Project compared that transformation to the kind of commercialization that frequently takes over cultural rebellions like hip hop, though my The Ethos Group colleague Dharma Dailey was quick to note that a conference on community hip hop would have very different demographics.
The Greatest Threat
The greatest threat to community wireless networks in the United States is not co-optation. It's CALEA. The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act requires any provider of an [information service] to include equipment in their network to facilitate wiretapping. The act was originally instituted in 1994 following the transition from analog to digital phone lines, but the FCC, at the behest of the Department of Justice, recently applied it to all Internet service providers, from the largest telco or cable company down to the neighborhood coffee shop with a hot spot.
The burden of compliance with CALEA is severe enough that it threatens to completely wipe out the public sharing of Internet access. To be in compliance with the law, network operators must install equipment that costs anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 or outsource compliance to a trusted third party. The equipment enables the real-time transmission of data specified in a court order to the law enforcement agency. Non-compliance is punishable with a fine of $10,000 a day.
Casey Lide of the Baller-Herbst Law Group, Harold Feld, Martha Huizenga of DC Access and the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA), and Andrew Afflerbach of the Columbia Telecommunications Corporation did their best to explain the law to a room full of concerned summiteers. Unfortunately, the law is rather vague as it applies to community wireless networks. That means it could wind up in court at some point to determine how various terms and exemptions will be applied. In the meantime, Feld worries that large network operators will use CALEA non-compliance as a reason to refuse interconnection with smaller networks like those represented at the Summit.
The good news is that developers have produced an open source solution that may cost as little as $3000, but even that could cripple the sort of volunteer-run associations that typify community wireless networks, to say nothing of basic hot spots or neighbor-to-neighbor broadband sharing. "Free community broadband may be a thing of the past," said Afflerbach.
That quashing goes against much of the FCC's rhetoric about promoting broadband access, Feld lamented, but he noted that such a contradiction on its own is not enough to prevent CALEA from being the law.
The Future
Whatever the challenges -- political, legal, social, or technical -- what was clear coming out of the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks is that they require a coordinated response from the community wireless movement. As summiteer and Chicago-based technologist Jerry Gleason said, "More mature hacking means working in teams."
In addition to the idea of hosting similar gatherings in Europe, Latin America, and India, there was even some discussion among summiteers of forming a more official association of community wireless networks. They are moving to address the pressing need to consolidate both the existing knowledge in the field and the social networks that are putting that knowledge into practice around the world.
