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Wireless vision breaking down fences

Remember when the Internet was all about building community?

Earl Levine remembers. He’s a throwback even as he works to move his Palo Alto neighborhood in to the future. Levine, a tech consultant by trade, has a vision of connecting his neighbors through a volunteer-run wireless network.

By Mike Cassidy
Knight Ridder Newspapers

"This is pretty cool," he says of Wi-Fi, a hot technology and ongoing interest of his. "I think people love the concept, and the neighbors are all behind getting this thing going."

Levine’s neighborhood is one of dozens of communities pulling themselves together with technology that provides high-speed Internet connections over radio waves.

His neighbors are starting small, but thinking big. Levine and others have talked the network up through regular neighborhood association meetings and newsletters. They hope to expand to hundreds of users, up from about a dozen today. Users would split the cost of a commercial DSL line to bring a high-speed Internet connection to the neighborhood.From there, wireless transmitters would beam the connection from house to house — all for $20 a month. Neighbors willing to work at much slower dial-up speeds would connect free.

The early going has revealed complications: telecom companies with changing service programs, bugs inherent in any network, the difficulty coordinating a volunteer project.

So the wireless project has soared and sputtered.

After losing their DSL provider, residents are shopping for a new provider and lobbying the city for cut-rate Internet access through a city-owned fiber-optic ring.

But while the wireless network has yet to flourish, Levine already has connected his neighbors in ways he never envisioned.

Just talking about and building the network has brought neighbors together.

"We had this meeting in the park," says Paul Lomio, a 15-year resident who is not the technical sort.

"All these people came out of the woods who I’ve never seen before. It was nice talking to them."

Yes, they were tremendously geeky, says Lomio, an administrator at Stanford University’s law library.

"They were talking up a storm and I knew nothing," he says. "But their enthusiasm was contagious."

The neighborhood of roughly 900 households next to Stanford’s campus is prime Wi-Fi territory. It’s inhabited by a mixture of students, academics and tech wizards. They are doers. Networkers in the old and new ways.

The radio signal moves among repeaters in houses throughout the neighborhood. The Internet connection is passed from house to house and neighbor to neighbor.

And when something goes wrong, it sometimes requires actually talking to the person next door or across the street.

"When there were problems, I would ask Elliot," Lomio says of neighbor Elliot Margolies. "And he’d go outside and look at the lights on his box and see if they were blinking or not."

And Elliot sometimes checks with neighbors, too, which is how he’s come to know Jennifer and Dino and Ann and Scott and Rowitha. And how he’s become a Michelle Shocked fan. (Something about trading CDs with neighbors.)

Someday the network will be viable. Levine is sure of that. But whatever the fate of the wireless system, it seems his neighbors already have built a network that will endure.

Mike Cassidy is a columnist with the San Jose Mercury News.

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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