Some Thoughts on Free Community Wireless LAN
There is some interesting discussion on freeing your WiFi in Abe’s blog today. The blog post contains a few musings on how to do free WiFi.
I’ve been talking to several people, especially bloggers about the possibility of this “open source” project. I’d ask them if they have wifi at home and if they freely share that with their neighbors. Most of those I asked tells me they have some sort of encryption and password protection and do not freely share their bandwidth.
I remember having this discussion with a few officemates too. There have been a number of good suggestions moving back and forth.In the end, we agreed on this solution (provides the overall best picture for us).
- No WPA or WEP. No MAC filtering. No Security. This allows non-tech savvy users to easily connect to the free community service. This way there is no teaching of users necessary.
- Use of a Capture Portal. Knowing who is free loading … ahem, using … your WiFi network is important too. Therefore, it is agreed that a registration page is presented as a capture portal. A few user details, the mandatory form field for “saying thanks” and an option to donate via Paypal. For you bloggers out there, you can make the capture page contain content from your blog (and of course, make advertising revenue). The more people the more revenue.
- Set comfortable limits. If you are really worried about unscrupulous activities on your WiFi network then you can set limits (bandwidth, time, content, sites). The network is still yours after all. One of the recommended ways of doing this is to run all traffic through a transparent proxy. This way you can control access. (For practical jokers, you can morgify all images to invert them).
- Mesh is the way to go. The best way to connect peers into a WiFi network is to use mesh WiFi technologies like those mentioned in Abe’s blog and other players like Meraki Networks, Strix and the MIT roofnet project.
Looks like a good plan to me. Right now, I have not implemented in full yet because I don’t have a 24×7 box to put as a transparent proxy. My WiFi router is also not flashable. I would have wanted to put the capture portal stuff on it. Just a little more time maybe. Of course, I would definitely appreciate additional suggestions. Good luck!
March 4th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Well, I’ve got encryption and password protection enabled, but if my next-door neighbour asked me, I’d give it to him. I’d just do it for his family though because my parents are friends with them and they’re nice.
March 4th, 2007 at 2:43 am
This would be the “typical” way of doing things. However, sometimes neighbors are too “shy” to ask for the security details. In most cases, they just never bother asking. This is fine if you are just a generous soul. But if you are a generous soul and would like to promote your blog with a capture portal then this is not enough. Requiring people to ask if just too much of a barrier to entry.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:54 am
my neighbor is a biz dsl account for his telecom eqpt biz. He owns an eatery across his office and offers it for free if you spend at least 100 there. am not sure if people bite, but our area is middle class, lower middle class down - so maybe not really a great come on, business-wise. I offered 500 a month for connecting to him. he only has to put his router in the second floor so i can access it from our house. and he has not done it yet.
off topic: Are you into Web 2.0? Who in ADMU do i talk with? Thanks!
March 6th, 2007 at 2:16 am
hmm… if somebody offered to give me 500 php per month to share my DSL i would gladly do so. right now, i am not a big bandwidth user so it does not really impact me a lot. besides, i am giving it away free now so any money is actually good.
you can send me a personal email to wyu at ateneo dot edu if you would like to know more about our research initiatives. or you can visit http://cng.ateneo.edu/cng/wyu/classes/cs197/ for more information about the research group and its agenda.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:16 am
[…] There’s a post at Yugatech about opening your AP (as in publicly sharing your broadband Internet). There’s a follow up on it too. This post is the expansion on the idea that I posted as a comment. […]