Preface

Building Wireless Community Networks is about getting people connected to one another. Wireless technology is being used right now to connect neighborhoods, businesses, and schools to the vast and nebulous entity known as the Internet. One of the goals of this book is to help you get your community "unplugged" and online, using inexpensive off-the-shelf equipment.

A secondary, but critical goal of this book is to come to terms with exactly what is meant by community. It might refer to your college campus, where many people own their own laptops and want to share files and access to the Internet. Your idea of community could encompass your apartment building or neighborhood, where broadband Internet access may not even be available. This book is intended to get you thinking about what is involved in getting people in your community connected together, and it will demonstrate working examples of how to make these connections possible.