Sam Varghese
Monday, 14 January 2008 21:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 6
Asked how much community wireless could contribute to providing internet connectivity to places in Australia which cannot be wired, Hawtin says WiFi or WiMax could well be used as an interim step to provide services which are not otherwise available or to provide community connectivity in a township area.
"There is already widespread use of wireless technologies in telecommunications. There are wireless technologies used in provisioning voice, internet and other services. I believe most of the modern phone systems use microwave to get out to the remote rural communities. So it is possible that the use of community band consumer grade WiFi for long distance infrastructure is not what they (politicians) mean.
"It might be that they are thinking of using fibre or point-to-point microwave for long-haul infrastructure and combining that with the local area technologies for the 'last mile'."
He points out that the main issues at this point in time are related to spectrum licensing. "Currently the community segment of the spectrum is licensed so that it may not be used for internet provision for third parties. Communities currently using community wireless are building infrastructure to share amongst peers within a group and are not making ISP-kind networks at this stage."
He is disappointed that there seems to be very little research in the Australian arena in delivering services over wireless. "...rather we depend on technology developed elsewhere.
As a result of this we tend to have solutions that half fit our needs. We suffer from this a lot in the communications industry and commercial delivery in IT services. Perhaps this is why free software and open source is making vast inroads into Australian small IT business, the need to roll your own solutions to solve a particular problem."
How workable is the idea to have community wireless networks where people can let others use spare capacity? Hawtin says this is widely used in other countries where the laws on internet provision over ISM bands like WiFi allow it.
"I have helped set up a number of small networks in the UK to do exactly this. Effectively a co-op buys an internet connection and distributes access over a series of point-to-point WiFi links, adding services around the network. The initial outlay may be more than connecting as an individual, but this can be considerably cheaper to maintain than each member having an internet connection. Maintaining the network can be seen as a cost of this kind of approach, but for people interested in wireless technologies it is also an opportunity to learn skills and participate in an interesting technology project."
