Tunnelling home
There is one thing that I intend to do when I finally get out of rented accommodation and own my own house. That is to throw up and antenna and connect to whatever wireless user group covers my area.
I see that even the geeks down in Soweto are getting in on the act with their own WiFi highsite and a wireless user group to keep the whole thing going.
There is one thing that I think would take the whole WUG concept beyond the niche service that it is today and make it something that could really make the cellphone operators sweat at night.
There was a time, a few years ago, when I thought that it would be awesome if everyone had a WiFi connection that had two modes. The first mode would be a restricted, internet connected mode which would be password protected and provide personal access for them in their house.
The other mode would provide an open, mesh network connection that would not only allow open access but would also actively seek out similar devices in the area and create an open link between the two access points.
Then while you were out and about you could find one of these access points and it would then route all your traffic back across this ad-hoc network to your home access point where you would then be able to access your own internet connection.
Now there are a million problems with that kind of system. Not least of them is that you need to have an uninterrupted mesh connection back to your home network and any number of factors could prevent that from happening.
Also considering that my WiFi router struggles to cover my whole property I doubt that without a significant increase in output you would be able to get the kind of coverage you need for a crazy scheme like that to work.
So I had another crazy idea. This one also needs a router that can provide both public and private networks; this is important so that you can protect your personal network and restrict its range while providing maximum accessibility for the public network.
Then this public network links back to the nearest highsite, and through the WUG network connects to your home network, allowing you full access to your home internet connection.
The implication would be that, wherever you have access to an affiliated hotspot, you would have free access to your home network.
If we could get this to take off then maybe the idea of a community supported, essentially free data network would be available to anyone who wanted to participate in the project.
Of course there are also a lot of issues that could cause this to bomb out. Like any member of the community that hadn’t secured their home network properly would be at much greater risk of being hacked, but maybe that could be resolved by means of a central authentication server. But that would introduce costs to the system.
The main idea is really to use the infrastructure that a dedicated group of hobbyists are already rolling out to provide a service that would free us of the crazy data fees that the cellphone networks have no interest in cutting, we are paying for data access at home, why shouldn’t we be able to take that on the road for the same cost?
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