SCN: Wireless guerrillas

Fri Dec 7 08:35:40 PST 2001

x-no-archive: yes

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ASPEN, COLORADO (Wall Street Journal)---Jim Selby clambered 
up a ladder onto the roof of a four-story office building here to 
survey his little alternate empire.  

"I've got one on top of there," he said, pointing to a distant rooftop, 
"and one there, too." Mr. Selby was speaking of all the gray 
antennas dotting the skyline, broadcasting Internet access all over 
town. The service is fast and free, which makes Mr. Selby, who put 
up the towers, a bit of a revolutionary.  

"I've got Aspen nailed!" says Mr. Selby, 35 years old, as he 
gestures at a dozen antennas atop low-rise buildings. "I've opened 
the network up to the masses."  

Some of the nation's big corporations have racked up billions of 
dollars in losses trying to bring high-speed Internet access to all 
who might want it. But the 6-foot-4 Mr. Selby, an avowed ski bum, 
is doing it in his own small way with a combination of Russian 
military-surplus antennas and electronic parts from a hardware 
store. His antennas allow anyone in a 45-square-mile area around 
Aspen with a computer and a $120 plug-in card to surf the Web 
over the airwaves free at speeds 30 times as fast as with a 
standard modem.  

Mr. Selby is a wireless guerrilla, one of several hobbyists around 
the nation who are building shoestring wireless networks out of 
such materials as potato-chip cans and rubber hoses. They are 
doing so by piggybacking free of charge on the premium high-
speed Internet connections that telecom and cable companies 
provide to many homes and businesses for as much as $1,000 a 
month. Even so, Mr. Selby, who eventually aims to charge for 
access to his network, says he hasn't encountered any resistance 
from providers of such high-speed links, who don't seem worried 
about his plans.  

Mr. Selby and fellow guerrillas now operating in cities such as New 
York, Portland, Ore., and Seattle are defying the conventional 
wisdom that building high-speed networks is complex and costly. 
Their secret is a technology known in technical lingo as 802.11b, 
or Wi-Fi. It was never intended for public Internet access. 

Using the same unlicensed radio spectrum as microwave ovens 
and baby monitors, it was designed primarily to transmit signals for 
300 to 400 feet in wireless corporate computer networks and from 
a phone line to a laptop. But history is full of unscripted uprisings 
just like this, in which people take an existing technology off the 
shelf and put it to an unanticipated use.  

It doesn't take much time or money to set up an 802.11b network. 
"All that's involved is a simple geek factor," says Bruce Potter, a 
wireless guerrilla in Leesburg, Va., who estimates it cost him $500 
in cables, wireless cards and other equipment to create a wireless 
node atop his house. "I've built three or four other antennas so far 
using Pringles cans, and that cost me about $4."  

Many of the guerrillas have adopted a crusading tone about their 
work. "I want bandwidth to be as free as air," says Rob Flickenger, 
who founded a free wireless network in Sebastopol, Calif. 
Bandwidth is the capacity to carry data; broadband is used to 
describe connections that are faster than conventional modems. 
Kevin Rich, a Denver-based proponent of free wireless networks, 
adds: "We want to make it a people's movement."  

Wireless guerrillas could face trouble from their own Internet-
service providers for allowing nonsubscribers to tap in, but so far 
nobody has bothered them because of the small number of users 
involved. Shaun Gilmore, executive vice president of Qwest 
Communications International Inc., which provides local phone 
service and high-speed Internet access in Aspen, says the 
wireless guerrillas are "creative people developing creative ways" 
to make high-speed Internet access available. Building an 802.11b 
network to piggyback on a high-speed Internet line is "not 
technically illegal," Mr. Gilmore says in a statement, but adds that it 
can slow the Internet connection.  

Mr. Selby began investigating wireless technologies a few years 
ago. Through word of mouth, he found a wireless-equipment 
supplier in Solon, Ohio, from whom he bought two surplus Russian 
military antennas for a total of $700. At an Aspen hardware store, 
he picked up a length of rubber hose to protect the wiring. Then he 
placed the antennas, which he nicknamed "the Ruskis," on an 
office building owned by some friends and atop his own 
townhouse.  

When Mr. Selby flipped the switch in August 1999, not much 
happened. "We didn't know squat," he says. But after making a few 
adjustments, he had a faint signal between his house and the 
office building. His friends' office was connected to a T-1 line, a 
direct, high-speed link to the Internet. He had created wireless 
coverage in a 13-block area. That gave him an idea: Why not 
deliver the Internet to everybody in town?  

Mr. Selby quickly sold his house in Detroit and plowed $80,000 
into broadening the network. He began scouting out locations for 
other antennas. Last year, a former high-tech executive who lived 
in a mountaintop home gave him permission to put up an antenna 
in exchange for free wireless service. That increased the network's 
wireless coverage by five square miles. Mr. Selby soon made the 
same barter deal with other mountaintop residents.  

Word of the free network began spreading. Bill Gurley, a partner at 
Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, and Sky 
Dayton, founder of Internet-service provider Earthlink, 
unexpectedly tapped into Mr. Selby's network while in Aspen for a 
conference earlier this year. Mr. Dayton opened his laptop in his 
hotel room and found he could choose from four guerrilla wireless 
networks, including Mr. Selby's, to reach the Internet. "I was 
floored," Mr. Dayton says.  

Other entrepreneurs are launching companies to offer small-scale 
Internet access via 802.11b in airports, hotels and coffee shops. 
And some think the technology could be harnessed to offer 
commercial high-speed Internet access to homes and offices. 
These developments could conceivably spell trouble for long-
delayed "third-generation" cellphone networks, which are to offer 
high-speed data services in addition to voice.  

Security is an issue, as some companies using 802.11b 
discovered when hackers tapped their corporate networks. Mr. 
Dayton says he can detect a neighbor's 802.11b network when he 
logs on at his Los Angeles home. You can't prevent people from 
picking up the signal, which is why Mr. Dayton sees his neighbor's 
network, but you can encrypt the traffic so they can't read it. Most 
experts think the problem can be circumvented.  

For the past few months, Mr. Selby has been concentrating on 
scraping together more cash to expand the network, which he says 
has attracted about 70 free users, including 10 regulars. He plans 
to augment his 13 antennas with three more by the end of the 
year. 

To raise cash, he sold the wireless network in August for $120,000 
to a small Aspen company called Broadband West. Mr. Selby, who 
still runs the network, says he and Broadband West hope to start 
charging an unspecified fee for the wireless access sometime next 
year. When the network shows up on somebody's laptop, the 
person will be directed to a Web page and asked to provide a 
credit-card number and pay a fee.  

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