The Tyee has a “great article”:http://www.thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2005/12/21/FreeWirelessFever/ about Community Wireless in Canada, especially in Vancouver. They mention some of the work of our friends up north in Montreal (“IleSansFil”:http://www.ilesansfil.org) and Toronto (“Wireless Toronto”:http://www.wirelesstoronto.ca/):
bq. While the city governments ponder the issue, activist groups across the continent spread the word about free wireless access through the grassroots. In Toronto, there are two organizations working towards a free wireless network: Wireless Toronto and the Toronto Wireless Community Network. Montreal has Île sans Fil, which created the open source application WifiDog for managing wireless access.
bq. In this province, the main advocate of public wireless is the BC Wireless Network Society, an all-volunteer organization with no outside funding. Incorporated in 2004, the BCWN has about 500 registered users and more than 90 volunteers. Matthew Asham, the society’s director, says, “We have geeks, we have nerds, we have socialists, we have hackers, we’ve got pharmacists, we’ve got city councilors, we have lots of people.”
bq. In BC’s cities, BCWN’s main project is to encourage the growth of free hotspots, local wireless access points at coffee shops, restaurants and other businesses.
bq. Deborah Moffat, BCWN’s volunteer coordinator and the manager of the ABC Country restaurant in Burnaby, says offering free wireless is valuable to businesses. “Maybe you have thirty “customers in the restaurant], and five of them are logged on, that’s pretty good. That’s five “customers] you might not have had, had you not had wireless. If I were alone, and I would choose the place with wireless. Also, if I had a meeting, I would choose the place that had wireless.”
bq. But businesses often lack the technical skill to prevent malicious users from launching viruses or spam or hogging bandwidth. That’s why BCWN’s programmers are working on modified version of Île sans Fil’s WifiDog application. WifiDog makes it simpler to prevent hotspot misuse, by requiring the user to log in with a central server, which would be run by BCWN.
NYCwireless is also using “WifiDog”:http://www.ilesansfil.org/tiki-index.php?page=Wifidog to run our “new hotspots”:http://auth.nycwireless.net.
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