Monday, October 16, 2000		Article

2 men hope to beat telecom giants

Using an aerial, a lightning conductor, a floppy disk and a microwave transceiver little bigger than a credit card, a pair of techies are hoping to beat the world’s big telecommunication companies and launch the first broadband wireless Internet in the UK.

James Stevens and Julian Priest of Consume.net represent a growing group of persons who believe that the Internet should be as free as the air we breathe - and are planning to make it so.

Everyone, they say, should have the right to access to the Net because it is too valuable a thing to be owned by small groups of organisations, i.e. the big telecommunications companies. They believe that the network should be owned by its users, and should be free. The current economic and regulatory framework is too slow, they say, and too expensive and is the cause of what is now being called the "digital divide".

The scheme will be piloted later this month in Shoreditch, east London. It involves the creation of a "data cloud" — a wireless Internet network distributed through the radio spectrum. The technology is already commercially available and, as long as the network is used for non-commercial basis, no licences will be needed, they say.

Stevens says: "We have already established three sites for antennas or nodes — which are omnidirectional send and receive stations. Once individuals have the wireless cards in their laptops they will be able to connect with our networks. "These first three nodes," adds Stevens, "are enough to generate a data cloud." The right cards for laptops are called 802.11 or wireless Ethernet and are available from companies like Lucent Technologies for as little as $ 217 (150 pounds sterling).

Of course, they cannot build a network on their own. Last month they invited others to participate in its building and design. The response so far has been promising. Nearly 400 have already joined the mailing list. These include the chief executive of a leading UK Internet service provider (ISP) and several high-end technologists. Already, another node is being developed in north London, and Medium Rare is building its own at London Bridge. The pair says that anyone can set up a node at a cost of $ 500 (350 pounds sterling). The initial nodes will rely on connections to the "outside" Internet — which will still have to be paid for. But the pair sees no reason why the network cannot stand-alone once it has grown big enough.

The idea for the network began in 1995. Then, Stevens had just co-founded Lateral, one of the UK’s first Web design agencies. Lateral was leasing a 2 MB connection from a business park in north London at a cost of $ 2,90,000 a year. Stevens found that he was using a mere quarter of the bandwidth and wanted to redistribute the spare capacity to the other creative groups in his neighbourhood. One of those groups was Web designer, Medium Rare, whose technical director is Julian Priest.

The trouble was that they were housed in the building opposite and it is illegal to string a cable across a street in the UK.

So, Priest went out and bought a pair of microwave transponders for $ 435, similar to those found in mobile phones, and hooked up to Lateral’s bandwidth with a wireless connection. The pair says that the idea for a citywide network came from there.

"The whole environment of communications is very tightly controlled. Because that’s where the power is, especially these days," says Priest. "That’s the reason why we couldn’t hang a wire across the street."

"The good thing about what we are doing now is that you don’t need planning permission to build the network. And you don’t need a licence." This is because they plan to operate on the part of the radio spectrum, usually used by CB enthusiasts.

The data cloud, they say, is not the Internet for free, but the Internet in return for participation. Although the protocols are still to be thrashed out, they will give access only to those prepared to build a node.

The nodes work by both transmitting and receiving large amounts of data. This means that those participating in the creation of the data cloud are effectively sharing bandwidth. So, although technically feasible, simply buying the correct PC card will not be enough.

Beyond that, the group hopes to connect local networks and get backbones between local networks running under their own rules. Similar networks are already under way in Sweden and the USA. Consume is constructing a legal framework that will be built into its software that will define how resources should be shared, "both inside and outside the network’’, says Stevens.

— By arrangement with The Guardian