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Mesh Less Cost of Wireless -A group of wireless enthusiasts provide a town in western England with Internet access at a fraction of the usual cost.

A networking tool designed to let soldiers maintain constant communication on the battlefield is being redeployed for a non-military purpose: providing free broadband connections.

By Elisa Batista Wired.com

The devices, known as MeshBoxes, allow for hundreds of Internet users to share a single broadband connection.

With just five MeshBoxes, the tiny municipality of Kingsbridge, Devon, in western England, was able to provide broadband access to the citizens who live in the center of town. A group of enthusiasts eventually want to provide all 5,000 of the town’s residents with wireless broadband.

Frustrated with British Telecommunications slow progress in wiring the town with DSL, two members of the Kingsbridge Link project took charge. They purchased the MeshBoxes for around $2,400, and strategically placed them in the center of town.

The boxes piggyback off a single broadband pipeline owned by one of the local businesses and distribute bandwidth to the residents who tap into the network.

Users can download and swap information, share printers and even bandwidth — for free. To partake in the network, they need only a PC card for their laptops ($80) or a Wi-Fi radio adapter for desktop computers that could be purchased off the shelf for about $160.

The eventual goal for the MeshBoxes is to get enough of them out on the street so that almost anyone could get Internet access from anywhere, said Jon Anderson, co-founder of LocustWorld, the company that sells the MeshBoxes.

According to Anderson, LocustWorld has sold about 270 MeshBoxes to date. He hopes the technology will eventually be used throughout Europe, such that anyone traveling outside their homes can pop open their laptops and surf the Web wherever they go.

"The long term plan for this is to build absolutely gigantic networks," he said. "It’s evolving into such a total reality."

Industry analysts have doubts as to whether this plan could be implemented on a larger scale.

Seamus McAteer, an analyst with Zelos Group, said such a scenario requires the cooperation of individual users, who would have to agree to share the same phone line. Similarly, DSL providers, who own the pipelines, would have to back the idea.

However, the concept relies on two technologies that are already readily available: Wi-Fi and mesh networks.

Wi-Fi, the most popular form of wireless Internet access, is practically ubiquitous in coffee shops, airports, offices and homes in the United States. The technology was slow to catch on in Europe, but that appears to be changing.

The number of so-called hot spots in Europe — places where people can receive Wi-Fi access — has jumped from 269 at the end of 2001 to 1,150 at the end of last year, a gain of 327 percent, according to market research firm IDC.

A drastic decline in price for Wi-Fi gear and easing of federal restrictions surrounding the build-out of hot spots, both contributed to a surge in Wi-Fi use, IDC said in a recent report.

Even though the concept of tapping into Wi-Fi networks for Internet access is fairly new in the region, some European communities are already looking at ways to connect these hot spots for wide-area seamless coverage. That’s where mesh networks come into play.

Soldiers in remote areas and emergency rescue workers already use mesh networks to communicate directly with one another rather than rely on an on-site base station, or in the case of Kingsbridge, an Ethernet connection in every single home.

Generally, when someone makes a cell-phone call, the phone’s signal travels to a cell tower and then to another person’s handset. A mesh network decreases dependence on cell towers by allowing the signals of one phone to jump directly to another handset.

Peter Stanforth, chief technology officer for peer-to-peer wireless provider Mesh Networks, said the advantage of a mesh network is that individuals can communicate with one another without having to build expensive infrastructure like cell-phone towers or additional broadband pipelines. The signal from one device like a cell phone or a desktop computer could jump from one handset to another until it reaches its final destination.

Such a system could reduce the amount of dropped calls and spotty coverage, which can arise when the cell tower is overwhelmed with calls. It would be easier and cheaper to install a mesh network and more affordable for customers to use, Stanforth said.

The one disadvantage of this relay system is a slight latency — usually lasting milliseconds.

"We felt that this was the way wireless should be done in the future," Stanforth said. "The ability to use a lower-powered radio to help with the whole cost of scalability — that’s really what it’s all about it."

A couple of groups that won’t view this technology as a convenience are the phone companies and cable service providers.

Considering that they installed the broadband pipelines to begin with, they don’t like the idea of residents selling the bandwidth or giving it away for free, McAteer said.

Even if the more open-minded telcos were to allow it — Anderson said he’s been approached by an Internet service provider open to bandwidth sharing — this doesn’t mean that the residents will go for it.

"First of all you would have to have an agreed upon protocol to authenticate users and give access across a host of networks, cooperating access point providers and getting everyone to agree to share," McAteer said. "I think it’s a stretch."

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