Community networks a cinch

By PETER GRIFFIN

A weekend "war driving" competition in Auckland has shed light on the growing interest in community wi-fi projects and the ease with which non-commercial hotspot wireless networks can be set up.

The volunteer organisation NZ Wireless ran the war drive - which involved teams of competitors driving around the city using equipment to detect wireless access points that had been temporarily set up for the day - some in the shop fronts of obliging retailers.

The war drive took the form of a treasure hunt whereby a team discovering an access point would be given a geographic clue to discovering the next hotspot. The teams used software programs like Netstumbler or Kismit to sniff out hotspots.

The idea was to find all the hotspots in the fastest time - obeying traffic rules and speed limits.

Stumped hotspot seekers were able to text-message the organisers for clues but were hit with a five-minute penalty as a result.

A team of three Chinese friends, armed with a borrowed laptop with a wi-fi card inserted, took the top prize, finding the greatest number of hotspots in the shortest time. They beat teams armed with antennas designed for quicker hotspot detection and better signal strength.

One participant had been traversing the streets in his car with a GPS (global positioning system) connected to his antenna. He had detected a number of commercial hotspots which are automatically assigned a grid reference on detection.

A drive around the streets of Auckland had uncovered around 700 wireless access points, most of them corporate wireless networks and clustered in the inner city or satellite business zones such as Takapuna or the Albany industrial zone, he said.

"The interesting thing is that 60 to 70 per cent of them are unsecured and unencrypted. People just take their [wireless] routers out of the box, assign a username and password and nothing else."

NZ Wireless founder Nick Le Mouton said the organisation had 320 members nationally and a growing number of community access points. There were 121 nodes in Auckland, some of which were providing internet and network access to a small number of people.

The idea was to allow people to share hotspots to access the internet, dividing the cost among themselves.

"No money changes hands. And we don't want to become an ISP to do this. A couple of internet providers have actually offered to give us free bandwidth," said Le Mouton.

The success of community wi-fi depended on more hotspots going live, something which can be cheaply done. The technology involved includes a PC, wireless router and an antenna which can be assembled from tin cans for around $5.

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