Ya it is a bit of a no-brainer i suppose, There is already a city in brazil somewhere that has loaded their routers up with linux and done this.
Ive just googled for the last half an hour and cant find it. Dont have a clue where I saw it!
But wat they had done was created a honeycomb effect with routers throughout the area with only a couple actually connected to a line.
I'll let you know if I ever come across the article again
getting closer.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network
look at the external links at the bottom, it mentions a few projects including the brazilian one i mentioned, it links to a portugese page though.
Good link thanks Calum +rep.
Sherlock Holmes just advised me that it could possibly be because they speak Portuguese in Brazil that a Portuguese website appears. On his advice I visited babelfish and google translation services. By jove Watson, he was on the ball:
Babelfish told me:
"Wayflex telecom offers to the best way you to have its right connection InterNet of high speed with quality and prices.
The not qualified flexibility that the access without wire provides to allow that using of last mile, lines and that they search a service more efficient, flexible and economic can have access the InterNet of high speed with quality.
Domestic users now can sail in the InterNet in broad band, without wire, counting on a professional structure of access.
Corporative users also can be benefited with our technology, connecting external branch offices, agents and customers. In partnership with the most respected companies of the segment."
~o~ (translation ends - note for those who can't tell the difference between me writing English and a computer doing it)
Google told me pretty much the same thing but with a slightly less humorous translation hence I shan't trouble you with the details.
In short this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of but not managed by corporates, managed by user groups.
Get 100 or 1000 people in one area of a city to bang their routers up with one of the linux distro's then throw in a three or four T3 connections and bob (and his anarcho-communist buddies) are your aunties next-to-free-ISP.
I have a vision: We will sail in the InterNet of broadband for next to a nothing and putting up two fingers in the general direction of the capitalista pigs (except the one's we buy the T3 connections from ).
CrazyB
EDIT: PS Further research tells me the price they are charging of 49.90 Brazilian Real, or £13.65, a month is probably beyond these good folk of Rio de Janeiro.
Now here's an interesting community project: Gather a load of "redundant" hardware and go "wire the slums" - wirelessly, of course.
There's an amazing mesh network project going on in Tibet as well.
\m/ d(-_-)b \m/
R9 290X+Kraken+Corsair H90, Xeon 5649@4ghz, Asus P6T-WS Pro
Are you thinking about this in Dharamsala? If so, although being lead by the Tibetan Government in Exile, .... it's actually in India .. but it IS amazing and just the sort of thing I was thinking of - not only for the slums of Rio - but as being the next generation of network everywhere.
I find it hard to believe that the heavily repressive Chinese Government that rules over its Tibetan colony would allow anything as anarchic as a mesh network to be developed. They don't even let kids in Beijing look at the net without it going through a government firewall and filter.
http://tibtec.org/ That's the one alright.
Pretty neat stuff. Solar powered-linux hacked-Linksys routers are the primary hardware.
\m/ d(-_-)b \m/
R9 290X+Kraken+Corsair H90, Xeon 5649@4ghz, Asus P6T-WS Pro