Word: antennaed
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...looking closely, it's easy to miss the wi-fi antenna atop San Bruno mountain just south of San Francisco. There are a couple of dozen TV and radio broadcast towers, each about 300 ft. tall, surrounded with chain-link fences and electromagnetic radiation warning signs. The wi-fi antenna is a solitary 18-in. plastic stick that radio engineer Tim Pozar stuck up there on his day off. If it disappeared, fewer than a hundred people would notice. "It takes geeks like me, putting up antennas, to make this work," says Pozar...
What the geeks get in return is nothing short of astonishing. If you live in San Francisco and can see San Bruno or any of 16 other nodes in the home-brew San Francisco Local Area Network (SFLAN), you can stick your own wi-fi antenna on your rooftop, angle it in just the right direction and receive a clear, high-speed Internet connection--even from the other side of the city. The cost? Less than $100 if you buy your own parts, which can include an empty Pringles can. After that, you pay nothing. Nada. Zippo. Not a dime...
...vast library of defunct Web pages. He buys his Internet access wholesale from a local company at the bargain rate of $30 per megabit per month. The archive needs many thousands of megabits to do its job, and Kahle considers the amount of bandwidth that Pozar's San Bruno antenna requires--which costs Kahle less than $200 a month--to be insignificant. He is prepared to be far more generous. "We're a library," he says. "We're in the business of giving away information...
Still, SFLAN is in its infancy; the connections continue to be very buggy and nodes often go down. The next step is to build up a critical mass of roughly 50 nodes, at which point everyone in the city should be able to see at least one antenna. Kahle's high-speed Internet donation should comfortably support thousands of users, as long as they are not all simultaneously downloading Hollywood movies. If SFLAN gets any larger than that, Pozar admits, it will have to start charging some premium users and offering preferred access to paying customers...
...perfect wi-fi world, you wouldn't have such a hard time spotting the 18-in. antenna on top of San Bruno--because it would be the only one there. Theoretically, given enough unlicensed radio bands and megabits too cheap to meter, you could transmit via wi-fi all of today's broadcast TV and radio programs and every phone call (cellular or wired) as well--most of it free. That may sound like a tin-can-and-string utopia, but if the past 50 years of technology have taught us anything, it is this: never underestimate what geeks with...