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This page is devoted to a dream project of mine. The project is to establish a Community Wireless Network in Ottawa. I would be extremely pleased if at some time in the future I was able to take my laptop anywhere in Ottawa and be connected to the Internet using my 802.11 card. Speed is not an issue; even a few kbps are well suited for reading mail.

At this time, there is no network. But I have ideas... The network will be composed of, hopefully, overlapping 802.11b access points. Any individual that allows for their access point to be used by the community will, in return, have access granted to them by everyone else in the community. Authentication will be provided by a redundant authority system and using RSA public keys.

Users, who do not add any value to the community network, will only be able to use nodes that allow anonymous access. Each node on the network will decide if anonymous visitors have access to that node's facilities (routing, local host access, etc). And, that is the incentive to share.

After some investigation, I hope to use NoCatAuth as the means for setting up the network. See NoCatNet for more details about this project. If you don't know much about Wireless (like me when I started this project page) you may want to check out a very good 802.11 FAQ document provided at NoCatNet.

A mailing list has been setup. To join visit the mailman info page and fill in your email address. Once subscribed you can post to ottawa-wifi@flyingbits.ca.

For more information, or if you want to get involved, please contact bart@flyingbits.ca.

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