Building Wireless Community Networks, 2nd Edition

Certain cities--Singapore is one example--have begun to outfit gathering places like airport lounges and downtown coffee shops as "hot spots" that are served by wireless Internet antennas. It's possible for anyone with an IEEE 802.11b card in a laptop to sit down in one and have Internet access immediately. The author of Building Wireless Community Networks, Rob Flickenger, thinks this is a great idea. He's written this small, thin volume to explain to readers why wireless networking is a community asset, and to bring them up to speed on the technologies available for creating wireless hot spots. Community here means a collection of people, as in a town or neighborhood.

Wireless networking protocols are complicated, but IEEE 802.11b and the products that have sprung up around it (like Apple's AirPort and similar offerings from Lucent Technologies and Cisco Systems) are pretty easy to set up and integrate into a network. Flickenger's treatment deals with these admirably but places more emphasis on configuring operating systems (notably Linux) to work as wireless gateways for transient users. The really fun reading has to do with custom antennas, though. Flickenger explains--no kidding--how to convert a Pringles potato-chip can into an antenna for wireless networking and goes into detail on how to work around the challenges posed by topography and human-made obstacles. This is a smart book about one of the most exciting frontiers in computer networking. --David Wall

Topics covered: Means of delivering wireless network access (mainly Internet access) to rooms, buildings, communities, and whole geographic regions of up to a few miles in diameter. Design and placement of access points, as well as configuration of network nodes, is covered in detail, as are the legal and political aspects of building a wireless network for general community use.