I’ve been wandering around Everett today with Scarlet. We went to the County building, the City building and the Everett PD to discuss IT-related things. The main thing that we spoke about was the state of the Everett Wireless Network. I feel that the community should host its own internt service, and I’m trying to share with fellow citizens exactly how we might go about this.

I’ve been speaking with Metrix Communication about getting some hardware, and one of our fellow community wireless networkers about getting an installation and maintenance contract in place. After I learn how to do it and how well it works, I’ll perhaps try to sell my neighbors on it.

The idea is that those who want to communicate with one another place antennae on their roof and point them at the eachother. Of course not everybody can point an antenna at everyone with whom they wish to connect. Traffic may need to be routed through (optionally) trusted third parties to get from point A to point B.

Technology such as TLS can provide a means by which data transported over third parties can be guaranteed secure and verifiable. TLS used to be called SSL.

Each link would be capable of carrying roughly 20MB/s.

I am looking into pricing for radios and antennae. I’ll report here when I find something worth reporting.