Glenn Fleishman on Community Wireless
Glenn has been a friend of community wireless since the early days, it was great to catch up for a chat. He has just written a nice overview of the last five years of community wireless.
The idea of building citywide wireless networks from the community level was suspiciously simple back in 2000, although the plans sounded like the work of underground revolutionaries. "All of us were very idealistic, and all quite strongly opinionated," said Adam Shand, founder of Personal Telco, which had visions of such a network in Portland, Ore.
From talking to Glenn afterwards, I think the coolest thing to come from this is that he was expecting to discover that community wireless was mostly dead or dying. Instead, his investigation showed that not only was community wireless not dying, but that it was quietly thriving all over the USA.