Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM wrote a great overview piece of the wireless integration initiative we've been working on over at the Open Technology Initiative:

Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies that might help with the task. The New America Foundation has already applied for a grant under that program that includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the technology stack for a distributed, open source telecommunications system.

The project would combine well known projects, such as the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS, with new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project, which Kevin covered earlier this month and Commotion, open source firmware to enable routers to create an open mesh network. Dan Meredith, a technologist at New America broke it down for me, and said the hope is to deliver communications in areas where Internet access is scarce, but also among populations that are unable to use communications because of government interference. While this technology stack would have been of limited use in Egypt, it actually could have helped protesters in the country stay connected to each other if not to the wider Internet. Here’s how the pieces fit together:

The Serval Project: The goal here is to create software used to connect phones with or without Internet access. The project uses an existing phone number and handsets with the application installed can communicate with each other by calling the phone number of other phones in the Serval network. Serval does need some kind of wireless network on which to run, be it a wireless LAN that’s not connected back to the web or a GSM cellular network.

Commotion: This is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. This can be used to create a wireless LAN for Serval-enabled handsets to run on top of, or it can be used to create an access network in general. The point here is that it’s distributed, as opposed to every connection going back to a central wireless or wireline provider. Commotion networks have been set up in Detroit and Washington D.C. and the same technology has been used to set up networks worldwide. The Commotion site says:

Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications. Concurrently, we are working to provide strategic uplinks via satellite and dial-up to get folks reconnected to the global internet. Finally, we hope to integrate the good work folks at Tor are doing (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter) into a bundle and the firmware as well. More ideas are of course welcome!

Tor: If Commotion is the road for packets to drive around on and Serval is like the car enabling the drivers to get on the road, then Tor tints the car’s windows, according to Meredith. The software uses multiple encrypted nodes to route your traffic requests around the web to disguise where it is coming from, this shielding the identity of user or person making a web search. Bloggers, activists, journalists and the military use Tor to keep their location, IP address and web site visits secret. For dissidents, running Tor on top of Commotion can disguise the location of network nodes and users.

Open BTS or Asterisk : Using OpenBTS linked to an open source voice server running software such as Asterisk, a distributed network now has the ability to make voice calls without going back to the centralized core network of a wireless or wireline carrier. If one hooks a server running OpenBTS to an Asterisk server on a Commotion network then voice calls via VoIP are now available via the existing GSM radios on the phones, even without using something like Serval.

Open GSM: This one is a bit like Pump up the Volume, meaning it may be all rebel cool, but it may not be legal. Essentially its a project to build cheap base stations in various cellular frequency bands to deliver a cell signal to GSM phones. Since these towers are using airwaves purchased by private or state-owned telecommunications companies and could cause interference it’s pretty much going to be reserved for folks who aren’t okay with government regulations, or who can get approval for their networks. If your government doesn’t want you access the web, though, this base station connected back to a web gateway is one way to fight the power and provide web access.

Is this the final technology stack for providing safer and more reliable Internet access for activists and dissidents? I can’t say but as protests sweep across the Middle East and governments such as Egypt, China or Burma are willing to crack down on Internet access, the need for innovation around decentralized networks grows.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Muhammed Ghafari

Hoo-ray, it's time for the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks! The call for proposals is now officially open -- this is our first time hosting the Summit outside the U.S., so we're expecting a whole bunch of new folks from overseas. Here's more:

CALL FOR PROPOSALS -- Accepted April 1 - June 1, 2010

International Summit for Community Wireless Networks
August 12-15, 2010
Vienna, Austria

Propose panels online at www.wirelesssummit.org

Since the first National Summit for Community Wireless Networks in 2004, tens of thousands of community and municipal broadband initiatives have been deployed around the globe. The 2010 International Summit for Community Wireless Networks offers panelists to help shape the future direction of this thriving global movement. Over the course of three days, panels and workshops provide a significant opportunity for thinkers, developers, and stakeholders to swap notes and produce substantial recommendations supporting the continuing development of community wireless networks. By gathering leaders from across this field to exchange of strategies, stories, and best practices, the Summit is a key place to help shape the future of this global networking movement.

Interested presenters should propose innovative panels and workshops focusing on the three themes for the Summit: technology, policy, and implementation. The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks distinguishes itself from typical technical and academic conferences by engaging all participants in an ongoing dialog that encourages a strategic approach to community wireless network development and telecommunications policy reform. Panelists do more than present their work and opinions -- they facilitate a process that records lessons learned and help produce a comprehensive "to-do list" of action items for the coming months and years.

We invite your panel proposals and participation in this year's International Summit for Community Wireless Networks to discuss and exchange ideas on how to make universal broadband access a reality. Demonstrations of software innovation, success stories of network deployment, presentations of ongoing research and discussion of municipal and governmental collaboration, on both the national and transnational levels, are welcome. Panelists are encouraged to convene panels that look at specific issues from multiple angles and perspectives. Panel ideas will be accepted on a rolling basis and must be received no later than June 1, 2010. Please send panel proposals of 250 words or less to: summit at chambana.net. Travel stipends are available for speakers with financial need.

Past panels can be reviewed at http://wirelesssummit.org.

SAVE THE DATE!

August 12-15, 2010:
International Summit for Community Wireless Networks

Vienna, Austria
www.wirelesssummit.org

The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, Tech Gate Vienna, the CUWiN Foundation, and the Acorn Active Media Foundation are pleased announce that the annual International Summit for Community Wireless Networks will take place in Vienna, Austria from August 12-15, 2010.

Internet access is increasingly important to all facets of civil society. Since the first National Summit for Community Wireless Networks in 2004, tens of thousands of community and municipal broadband initiatives have been deployed around the globe, but many communities are being left out of this communications revolution. "The global coalition of developers, communities, industry, and advocates working together over the past decade has created one of the most disruptive and far-reaching technological innovations of our generation, yet few know about it and fewer still have taken advantage of this opportunity," says Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative and the Summit's founder. "The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks is the nexus around which this movement swaps notes, strategizes, and organizes its agenda for development and implementation of ubiquitous, affordable broadband networks."

2010 marks the first year that this group of technologists, entrepreneurs, government officials, academics and engaged citizens will convene outside the United States, a critical step to broaden and deepen international involvement in what truly is a global movement. Participants will learn from each other’s examples, exchange strategies and anecdotes, and build partnerships that strengthen alliances among projects.

Vienna possesses a rich and diverse mix of established technology companies and start ups, new media organizations, researchers and cultural producers as well as a remarkable number of institutions of higher learning. Not only is Vienna well positioned among the top international leaders in the information economy, the city is also home to FunkFeuer, one of the most advanced community wireless networks in the world. FunkFeuer is highly respected internationally for its technical and social innovations, its many collaborations with university researchers and artists, and the scale and scope of its network. The Summit will provide an opportunity to expand upon FunkFeuer's successes and spread best-methods for developing sustainable metro-scale wireless mesh networks.

The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks focuses on how wireless networks can better serve their target populations, the policies needed to support broader deployment of community wireless systems, and the latest technological and software innovations in the field.

More information on the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks, including a call for proposals, registration, and other logistical information, will be available in the coming weeks at www.wirelesssummit.org.

We look forward to seeing you in August!

About the Acorn Active Media Foundation: The Acorn Active Media Foundation engages in software, website and technical development in support of the global justice movement. Acorn's commitment to its work stems from a foundational philosophy that its projects should align with the Foundation's goals to support social and economic justice. More information is available at: www.acornactivemedia.com.

About the CUWiN Foundation (CUWiN): CUWiN is a world-renowned coalition of wireless developers and community volunteers committed to providing low-cost, do-it-yourself, community controlled alternatives to contemporary broadband models. Its mission is to develop decentralized, community-owned networks that foster democratic cultures and local content. Through advocacy and through its commitment to open source technology, CUWiN supports organic networks that grow to meet the needs of their community. More information is available at www.cuwin.net.

About the Open Technology Initiative: Part of the New America Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit, public policy institute in Washington, D.C., the Open Technology Initiative (OTI) formulates policy and regulatory reforms to support open architectures and open source innovations and facilitates the development and implementation of open technologies and communications networks. As an independent non-profit initiative, OTI provides in-depth, objective research, analysis, and findings for policy decision-makers and the general public. More information is available at: http://oti.newamerica.net.

About Tech Gate Vienna: Tech Gate Vienna is Vienna's first Science and Technology Park. For several years Tech Gate Vienna has provided a common location for research facilities, technology orientated companies and supportive advisory services. Vienna's focus on high-tech development is right here. Concentration on specific topics has ensured its effectiveness, and created an important requirement for developing synergies. More information is available at: http://www.techgate.at.

Here's a fun article from the upcoming issue of IEEE Spectrum. Interestingly enough, while here at the eComm Conference here in Amsterdam, I'm working with my friend, Aaron Kaplan, on some of the newest open source community wireless mesh software and will be bringing home a mesh-in-a-box to deploy in my own back yard.

Netbooks Are Only Part of The Solution

POSTED BY: Tekla Perry // Wed, October 28, 2009

Netbooks are going to be huge, much bigger than they already are. Trust me on this. I say this not because I see more and more people working on them in cafes instead of on standard laptops—though I do. It’s not because I particularly want one—though for short trips I can see the appeal. It’s not because on a recent multifamily vacation one family showed up with one netbook per child.

It’s because my 70-something aunt, the one with the 30-year-old radio that you can only turn off by pulling the plug, and the TV that gets its signal from a 50-plus-year-old two-wire cable, just told me she’s thinking of getting a netbook.

Oh, it’ll be a couple of years before she actually makes the purchase, but the fact that she’s evening considering it is huge. The appeal for her is the cost, for sure—if it turns out to be a mistake, it won’t be a huge mistake. But what also is drawing her is also the fact that netbooks don’t look all that high tech. They don’t take up much room, they don’t have a lot of extra buttons on the keyboard, and they don’t do vast numbers of things she wouldn’t want to do anyway—like edit video or spend hours typing long documents.

But she has been thinking that it would be pretty cool to look up a fact she read somewhere but just can’t remember exactly, or check out a new medication prescribed by her doctor before she orders it.
And that’s enough usefulness to make her part with $250 or so. Once she gets one, I’ll show her how she can keep up with all her grandnieces and nephews on Facebook, and she’ll be set.

Unfortunately, much as I would have liked to, I didn’t run out that moment and get her a new netbook. Because there’s one piece of this puzzle missing—some kind of community wi-fi access. It doesn’t have to be free, it doesn’t have to be fast, but it has to be there; easy to get to at a reasonable price.

Forget dial-up—netbooks don’t even come with built-in modems, and these days the bells and whistle of most web sites mean dial up is just too slow to be viable. Cable modem or DSL would mean new wiring in her home (she’s got one corded wall phone right now, no other jacks), and a box that would have to be installed somewhere, set up, and occasionally rebooted. I can’t see convincing her to go through that hassle and expense.

But community wi-fi would be perfect. She’d need nothing but the netbook, the monthly fee would be reasonable, and, while likely slower than cable or DSL, it’d be moving plenty fast for her needs.
Which got me wondering—what happened to community wi-fi, anyway? I called Sascha Meinrath, research director of the New America Foundation’s wireless future program. He told me that it’s been going great in Europe, but in 2004 or 2005 got sidetracked in the U.S. “The rationale of community wireless, bringing low-cost or free wireless to the masses, got usurped by the corporate model,” he says, “how do we charge money for it.” And the corporations that cities contracted with to build low-cost systems didn’t have a lot of incentive to make those systems succeed, since they’d be competing with their own, higher cost internet access offerings. Earthlink, for example, last year shut down it’s community wireless systems in Philadelphia and New Orleans.

The good news, Meinrath told me, is that community wireless in the U.S. may be starting a new surge. He sees encouraging signs in the efforts of Meraki, a Google-backed startup that’s building low-cost wireless networks for companies, universities, and communities, and other low-cost efforts. He’s starting to see municipal and community groups who looked at community wireless in the past but got put off by the apparently high costs getting ready to take another look at it. And, he says, the $7.2 billion in stimulus funds targeted at increasing broadband access can only help; he’s hoping communities will spend that money on low-cost open source systems instead of expensive proprietary systems to make it go as far as possible.

Now back to my aunt. She still wants that netbook—with Internet access, but without a box in her house. Community wi-fi may be coming, but not soon enough. So I’m thinking, next time I’m visiting I’m going to boot up my laptop and see if I’m picking up any signals; if I am, I’ll go knock on a few doors and see if I can borrow a cup of broadband.

I've been in Atlanta this week at the NATOA Annual conference. I presented yesterday evening on, "Grassroots Wireless: State of the Art Networking" (3.7MB) -- it was a lot of fun.

Dharma Daily organized a big dinner for a bunch of us community broadband advocates -- loads of fantastically delicious Indian food. I ended up down at the end of the table with Chris Mitchell, Jonathan Lawson, and Geoff Daily -- lots of raucous debate of politics, community organizing, and the role of protest in civil society. We ended the night at the top floor bar of the conference hotel -- drinking local brew and jamming out bluegrass with our mandolin and guitar.

Here's a good analysis on the state of municipal broadband -- from www.progressive.org/mag/aaron0808.html:

"The Promise of Municipal Broadband"

By Craig Aaron, August 2008

When Mayor John Street announced plans to make Philadelphia the nation’s first major “wireless city” back in the fall of 2004, the press couldn’t get enough. “Forget cheese steaks, cream cheese, and brotherly love,” declared The New York Times. “Philadelphia wants to be known as the city of laptops.”

Philadelphia’s goal to cover 135 square miles with a cloud of Internet connectivity was ambitious. But the need was undeniable. High-speed Internet access was fast becoming an economic, educational, and social necessity. Yet most of Philly’s residents were stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, unable to access or afford a broadband connection.

When Earthlink—a dial-up Internet company looking for a foothold in the broadband world—came forward promising to build a state-of-the-art wireless system without the city paying a dime, Philadelphia signed up. And soon, you couldn’t go a week without another major metropolis—San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Portland, Oregon—jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon.
So what happened?

Three years later, many of the projects seem to be sputtering. The tens of thousands of new subscribers didn’t materialize. Getting the equipment up on streetlights and buildings proved more expensive and technically challenging than expected. Chicago and St. Louis scrapped their plans last summer. In Tempe, Arizona, a company called Gobility shuttered the system there and unplugged its customer-service line. Earthlink abandoned projects in San Francisco and Houston, before announcing it was getting out of the municipal wireless business altogether.

With its flagship Philadelphia project still unfinished, new Earthlink CEO Rolla P. Huff announced last fall that “making significant further investments in this business could be inconsistent with our objective of maximizing shareholder value.”

Then the press pounced, with stories appearing in the Associated Press, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and the Times, declaring municipal projects to be floundering, fading failures. One tech writer dismissed municipal wireless as “the monorail of the decade.”

But all the obituaries are premature. A closer look at what’s happening at projects across the country—public and private, wired and wireless, big and small—suggests that it’s far too early to start the funeral arrangements. Much of the media are confusing the collapse of one company—or one model of broadband deployment—with the failure of the entire idea of municipalities providing high-speed Internet services.

“It’s like someone striking out in a boat in 1490, it sinking, and people saying, ‘You know what? This whole ocean travel thing isn’t going to work out,’ ” says Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Minneapolis-based research group that tracks municipal projects.

Even in Philadelphia, all is not lost. In June, a group of local investors announced they had arranged to take over Philadelphia’s network and offer free Wi-Fi outdoor—but details are sketchy.

Many projects—especially in small towns and mid-sized cities—are thriving. From Hermiston, Oregon, to Scottsburg, Indiana, to St. Cloud, Florida, city-owned wireless systems are up and running, serving local residents and businesses or local police and emergency workers. Places like Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and Kutztown, Pennsylvania, are building their own fiber-optic networks that offer high-speed Internet and cable TV.

In total, more than 400 cities and towns already have launched, or are developing, municipal broadband systems. Spending on municipal networks increased last year and is expected to keep rising. MuniWireless.com projects that annual spending on equipment and services will exceed $900 million by 2010.

Municipal broadband is caught up in a classic “hype cycle”—a term coined by the Gartner Research Group to chart technology trends. It works like this: First, new technology triggers a wave of excitement that builds to a “peak of inflated expectations.” For municipal broadband this was 2005’s heady days of “free Internet for everyone everywhere.”

After the peak, there’s a rapid slide toward what Gartner calls “the trough of disillusionment”—a.k.a. rock bottom or, in this case, the headline in the March 22 edition of The New York Times: “Hopes for Wireless Cities Are Fading.”

Vermont’s Tim Nulty isn’t mourning the troubles some cities are having with municipal wireless. To him, it was never the right technology for the job at hand. “Think about 747s and helicopters,” he says. “Helicopters are marvelous when they’re used for what they’re good at. But you don’t use them to fly thousands of people between Boston and Chicago. For that you need 747s.”

Wireless systems may offer mobility, but a fiber-optic network connected directly to homes boasts nearly unlimited capacity. Fiber is the jumbo jet of municipal broadband. Though conventional wisdom says fiber is too expensive or complicated for cities to handle, Nulty—who spent more than ten years in the ’70s and ’80s on Capitol Hill as the chief economist for the key Senate and House committees that make telecom policy—was recruited out of retirement to help the city of Burlington get a municipal fiber network off the ground.

That project became Burlington Telecom—a city department that now provides high-speed Internet, phone, and cable TV service to some 3,000 residential customers. While revenue from subscribers goes into the public coffers, at Nulty’s insistence the network itself was financed by private investors without any taxpayer money. Not only is the system up and running, but it already has a positive cash flow.

Nulty recently left Burlington Telecom to spearhead a project to bring fiber to smaller towns across Vermont. Twenty-five towns voted—many of them unanimously—to join a venture called the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network. As in Burlington, the networks will be built without taxpayer funds.

“I’m convinced this is the only way we in Vermont are going to get access to this high-speed stuff,” Jerry Drugonis of Pittsfield, Vermont, told the Rutland Herald after the vote. “We’ve been at the tail end of the dog for a long time.”

It doesn’t necessarily take a city department to bring high-speed Internet access to local residents. Some of the most innovative projects are small-scale, community-based efforts.

“We’re finally coming back around to ideas that were around before the corporate franchise was shown to be a failure,” says Sascha Meinrath, research director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program, who launched one of the nation’s first community wireless projects while he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “So much money was being spent to push the corporate model that it was all cities heard about. There was no PR or marketing for community wireless groups. But unlike the corporations, their focus has always been maximizing the public good.”

In Asheville, North Carolina, the Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) has been operating as a nonprofit Internet service provider since 1996, first with dial-up and now with wireless broadband. It uses “mesh network” technology created by a company called Meraki to serve hundreds of citizens in nine Asheville neighborhoods.

The network—the same type that Meraki is using to offer free wireless in San Francisco—allows many people in the same area to share one Internet connection. This type of neighbor-to-neighbor sharing is discouraged by the big phone and cable companies, but MAIN has its own connection to the Internet backbone.

MAIN is far from a traditional Internet Service Provider: It’s committed to closing the digital divide and recycles computers for use by local residents who otherwise couldn’t afford them; its website is a community media hub; and the group also runs a local low power FM radio station. Wally Bowen, MAIN’s executive director, sees the future of community media.

“I firmly believe that every public access TV operation, every community radio station, every nonprofit community technology center can be doing this,” he says. “It’s not rocket science. All of those technology-based nonprofits are strapped for revenue. We’ve got to figure out a way to capture some of those digital dollars that are falling out of our communities, and this is it.”

Small-town success stories are encouraging but they don’t answer whether municipal broadband can work in the big city. The recent completion of a citywide wireless network in Minneapolis suggests that cities may be learning from Philadelphia’s mistakes.

Minneapolis has already signed up 8,000 users, and its Wi-Fi network was used by emergency responders after the I-35W bridge collapse. Unlike Philadelphia, Minneapolis agreed to be the network’s “anchor tenant,” committing $1.25 million per year for the next decade.

“Having the city itself as the anchor tenant gives the provider an incentive to set up a good network,” says Esme Vos of MuniWireless.com. “From the get-go, there’s a set amount of money. Philadelphia never had that deal. San Francisco never had that deal.”

However, some in the Twin Cities are disappointed that Minneapolis opted to support a private network rather than constructing its own public one. “If a private company decides they just aren’t going to do it anymore, the community is stuck because it’s privately owned,” Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance explains. “If it’s publicly owned and the network is not going exactly as planned, they can decide if it’s still worth it for their police officers to have access; if it’s still worth it to have inspectors and social workers be able to enter their data remotely; if it’s still worth it for citizens to be able to connect anywhere. They can ask those questions and decide whether it’s good for the community or not.”

However, unlike Philadelphia, Minneapolis did choose a local company, U.S. Internet, to build the network. “That’s key,” Vos says. “U.S. Internet is not investing in a mobile handset project and trying to still provide DSL service and outsourcing their customer service to India. This is their main project.”

Local control—and with it, jobs and revenues staying in the community—appears to be one of the elements of success for municipal broadband projects large and small. The money stays in the community, jobs are being created, and everyone from firefighters to meter readers benefits.

“If you’re not sending money out to shareholders across the country and expecting a huge return on investment,” Mitchell says, “you can already have an advantage in terms of pricing it more reasonably to make sure your businesses and your people can afford to have fast connectivity that’s going to keep the city competitive regionally and globally.”

While municipal broadband projects can’t succeed without buy-in from local stakeholders, ubiquitous high-speed Internet access won’t be achieved via local governments or groups alone. We need a national broadband policy.

Back in March 2004, President Bush called for “universal affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007.” Yet in 2008, we’re nowhere close. And the United States is falling further behind the rest of the world. Much of Asia and Europe enjoys broadband speeds that are twenty to fifty times faster than what we get here—and they pay less for it.

“We have a failure on the national level that’s too important to ignore,” says James Baller, an attorney who represents local governments and public utilities and closely follows municipal broadband issues. “Not to view broadband as a strategic asset is a significant shortcoming. The other leading countries of the world do view broadband in that light, and they are thinking about how to get more of it at much faster speeds and lower rates because it’s a platform for so many other things that are important.”

Policymakers could create incentives for local communities to build telecom networks, spurring new competition and growing the new market for entrepreneurs and innovators, especially in areas bypassed or underserved by the big phone and cable companies. Better yet, says Asheville’s Bowen, these incentives could mandate that systems be locally controlled and nonprofit, ensuring that the investment stays in the community.

Yet, fourteen states currently have laws on the books—drafted by phone and cable company lobbyists—restricting municipalities from erecting their own broadband systems. The Community Broadband Act, bipartisan legislation that already passed the Senate Commerce Committee, would tear down the roadblocks. “The first thing we have to do,” Mitchell says, “is make sure that communities that want to solve their own problems, that want to build the network they need, can do that.”

Congress and the Federal Communications Commission also could improve municipal wireless by setting aside a greater portion of the airwaves for public use. Wi-Fi systems operate on narrow “junk bands” already cluttered with cordless phones, baby monitors, and the like, requiring more transmitters and higher costs to set up a network.

Meanwhile, vast portions of the broadcast TV spectrum—as much as 70 percent in some markets—are sitting unused because of outdated regulations and a misinformation campaign waged by the broadcasters’ lobby. These “white spaces” would allow signals to go farther and travel through obstacles. “If we open up the unused spaces between the television channels, it suddenly becomes possible to deploy the network that we need at a quarter of the cost,” says Harold Feld of the Media Access Project, a public interest communications law firm in Washington.

There is growing bipartisan support for many of these policies. And the nation’s broadband policy—or lack thereof—is even becoming a presidential campaign issue. To his credit, John McCain is a lead sponsor of the Community Broadband Act, though he hasn’t always backed public interest policies during his years on the influential Senate Commerce Committee and voted against restoring crucial “Net Neutrality” protections.

For his part, Barack Obama hasn’t yet signed on to McCain’s community broadband bill. But he supports Net Neutrality and has pledged to make Internet issues a top priority of his administration. In a June speech in Flint, Michigan, Obama declared: “As President, I will set a simple goal: Every American should have the highest speed broadband access—no matter where you live, or how much money you have. We’ll connect schools, libraries, and hospitals. And we’ll take on special interests to unleash the power of wireless spectrum for our safety and connectivity.”

In the end, the biggest obstacles to universal, affordable Internet access aren’t economic or technical. They’re political. Broadband is too important to the economy, education, and, well, democracy to be at the mercy of Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T. It’s time to rethink the approach to these problems and move the discussion past short-term technical fixes and next quarter’s profits.

“We need to start looking at this as an infrastructure issue rather than as a business,” Feld says. “We don’t ask cities and towns to cost-justify bringing in fresh water and having a sewer system when we could outsource it to private companies. Nobody says, why should my town compete with the private water market? I can get Perrier, why should I have water? We treat water as a utility. We do the same thing with electricity. We have to take the same attitude here toward broadband.”

Craig Aaron is the communications director of Free Press, the national, nonpartisan media reform group. A senior editor of In These Times, he blogs regularly about media, journalism, and the future of the Internet at SavetheInternet.com, StopBigMedia.com, and The Huffington Post.

[UPDATE02] Once or twice a week I get the question, "I'm thinking about using Meraki's equipment, what do you think?" And I always start my answer much the same way. [As a disclaimer, I've known the Meraki folks since their time back at MIT -- my development teams used to collaborate actively with them.]

Meraki is a great system for quick do-it-yourself networking. The technology is elegant and the graphical user interface (mostly) intuitive. If you want a plug-and-play technology immediately deployed, it's a good solution. But that is far from the whole story.

As many of my readers know, I've been advocating for open tech for years and years -- so how does Meraki stack up? The core technologies in Meraki are open source -- but they've been smothered in a proprietary wrapper that makes Meraki little different from most "black box" solutions. Users can't easily view the code, change features (or add features, for that matter), fix bugs, or otherwise adapt the technology for their own uses. As a number of open source projects have discovered, even gaining access to information that was covered by existing open source licenses has become increasingly difficult as Meraki has become increasingly proprietary.

Most people think Meraki's back-end is free. They are wrong. In fact, Meraki plans tomay eventually charge for the use of their services. As a recent GovTech article reported, Meraki's founder stated that their solution "includes three years of its data center services in the price of the hardware." For those who forget, Meraki's hardware used to cost $49 for an indoor node, then the cost went up to $149 -- if you wanted more equipment, you had to pay a rate three times as much, and since Meraki's equipment is sole-sourced, you had to pay whatever they charged.

I fully expect that we're going to see the same problem with Meraki's back-end services. Most users (and certainly just about everyone in the general public) thinks that once you buy a wireless access point that it will continue to work indefinitely (or at least until the hardware fails). With Meraki, however, you're getting a package of hardware and software -- and you can't run a Meraki network without Meraki's proprietary back-end. So how much will the service cost at the end of your 3-year "free" period? I have no idea (though if you know, please let me know). [EDIT: As Meraki CEO, Sanjit Biswas, clarified on this blog (see comments), "the cost the hosted backend service is included for the lifetime of the device with the current line of products at $149/$199. We may decide to unbundle the pricing with future products, but it will be clear to the customer and not a hidden fee." So current hardware should remain free to use. And what happens if you've been a Meraki network over that 3-year periodand are now about to get a huge monthly charge? Probably you'll either have to pay whatever they cost or parts of your network will cease to work. I'm not sure that I would agree with Sanjit that this is not a hidden fee -- most Meraki customers are not aware of the possibility that future compatible hardware might carry additional fees.]

Hundreds of projects, organizations, and municipalities are rolling out Meraki-based networks, yet few seem to understand that they're buying a bundled service not just a piece of hardware. Over time, these initiatives will end up paying an unknown amount of money to Meraki just to keep their system running. It is, in fact, the ultimate bait-and-switch paradigm -- you think you have a one-time hardware cost, instead you get vendor lock-in, recurring charges, and path dependencies.

These and other reasons are why it remains so important to support and utilize truly open technologies. The simulacrums are getting better and better -- but inevitably you're getting a worse deal than you think.

I've been bouncing between workshops, conferences, and summits for the past several weeks and haven't had a free moment to update folks on things. Thankfully, I'm out in CA, which means that my internal clock gets me up between 4:30 and 5:15am each day -- which is way before my local colleagues seem to be stirring and has enabled me to start catching up on the backlog. The 2008 International Summit was a resounding success -- here's a quick wrap-up:

Wow -- what a fantastic Summit!!! Over 150 people came through over the course of the 3-day gathering. Thanks to everyone who made this year's Summit so phenomenal!

Folks have been doing some great documentation of last week's International Summit for Community Wireless Networks -- for those who weren't there (and those who were), I thought I'd point out a few favorites of that people have sent along to me:

Steven Mansour has pulled together an *awesome* slideshow (with music!) that, I think, captures a lot of the energy, excitement, and conspiring (and debauchery) that went down at this year's Summit. This photo-video is really spectacular -- it's worth watching just for the cool effect of the medium -- check it out at:
http://stevenmansour.com/en/videos/2008/june/03/is4cwn_2k8_slideshow

Matt Westervelt took (last I looked) some 897 pictures at the Summit. Many of them are up at: http://flickr.com/photos/mattw/sets/72157605383291643 -- lots of great shots & candids.

Angela Siefer has a great synopsis of Harold Feld's rousing plenary talk titled, "Policy Hackers for Good," available on her blog: http://angelasiefer.com/wifisummit

For the Arabic readers amongst us, Abdelnasser Abdelaal has written up a synopsis for Al Hayat, one of major Middle Eastern papers. You can take a look at http://www.alhayat.com/science_tech/06-2008/Item-20080612-7cefe2ae-c0a8-10ed-0007-ae6ddb9e21f3/story.html. Google translate does an o.k. (though occasionally comical) job.

And the American Association for the Advancement of Science has a great synopsis of some of the keynote speakers up at http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2008/0605wireless.shtml, including Amir Dossal (head of the billion-dollar UN Office of Partnerships), FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Mark Ansboury from One Community, and Rey Ramsey (head of One Economy).

If you've created documentation that you'd like to share, please pass it along. As always, please tag your media "IS4CWN".

Could a political campaign be a catalyst for free wireless across the country? My colleague, Roy Russell, thinks so. He's just launched a campaign to create free open wireless hotspots with the network name, "Obama 2008." It's a great idea -- offer a useful service and local resource, advertise for your candidate of choice, and demonstrate the community-oriented ethos that permeates the campaign.

The affinity group is located at:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4jbm

As Ray writes:

I've turned the security off on my wi-fi network, and renamed the SSID to "Obama 2008". I think of my wi-fi access point as a tiny beacon of hope, beaming my support for Barack Obama out to anyone who is listening, at least with a wi-fi device within 100 yards of my home. And they're free to get some free Internet access. I enjoy sharing with my neighbors, and I encourage everyone to do the same!

Hopefully the other campaigns will follow suite. In the meantime, it would be fantastic to see some official recognition from the candidates for this innovative idea.

I've been talking with folks down in North Carolina about innovative business models that will facilitate public private partnerships whereby municipalities work with non-profit organizations to deliver broadband services. As the Philly model continues to flail about (though I'm hopeful for some resolution in the near future on this), alternative systems are being implemented. Wally Bowen over at theMountain Area Information Network (MAIN) has been heading up the charge. A month or so ago I wrote to the Asheville City Council supporting the plan that MAIN was proposing. And I'm quite happy to see such a resounding endorsement for what is certain to become a remarkably interesting municipal wireless project.

Here's more:

Asheville, N.C. endorses new Wi-Fi business model

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- A proposal to make Asheville a "Wi-Fi City" -- via city-wide, wireless Internet access -- won unanimous endorsement March 25 from the Asheville City Council.

The plan, put forth by the nonprofit Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN), would provide secure wireless coverage -- including mobile access -- throughout the city.

"I'm pleased that the City of Asheville has officially endorsed MAIN's 'Wi-Fi City' proposal" said Asheville Mayor Terry Bellamy. "This effort will not only help bridge the Digital Divide in our community. It also signals to the nation that Asheville has a 21st-century vision for an inclusive and sustainable Digital Economy. . . ."

Read the entire story: http://www.main.nc.us/wifi.