Neighborhood WiFi

If your neighborhood is anything like mine, every household has its own wireless network. When I search for nearby networks with my ten-dollar antenna hooked up to my PC, I can see up to 5 networks from the nearby houses. Currently each of these households pay the internet company for their own pipe to the internet. I propose that we hook our individual wireless networks together in order to make one larger network. Since not every house would use all of their internet capacity at the same time, we could get rid of several pipes thereby decreasing the amount of money necessary to give internet access to all the homes. While each house would still need a WiFi hub, the overall internet cost for the entire neighborhood would decrease. For example, if the five networks that I can see were to merge into a single network, it would be possible for the five of us to share three network connections and slash the costs of the other two.

The obvious advantage to this is the reduction in cost of internet access for our neighborhood. There are a few technical issues to work out such as the actual meshing of the individual networks into one. In addition, freeloaders also become a problem. The freeloader problem has an easy solution. A password on the network is the normal course that public WiFi hubs use. The more pressing issue is the actual consolidating of the networks and deciding how the remaining internet dues will be paid. The homeowner’s association in my neighborhood could implement such a system.