IT ALL STARTED with a can of Safeway-brand beef ravioli. Jim Meehan, a San Francisco network engineer, had been reading on Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), the geek news site of record, about how to build a homemade antenna for his computer. The heart of the contraption was an ordinary metal can. "They recommended using Malley's beef stew for the can, but the ravioli was cheaper," Meehan confesses. After some tinkering and tests, Meehan discovered his home-brewed antenna was far from ordinary: indeed, it's possible Meehan's humble ravioli can, combined with the know-how of a few hundred community-minded geeks, could dramatically reduce the cost of high-speed Internet access for everyone in San Francisco. In some cases, access might even become free.

Meehan's antenna isn't for listening to the radio – it's for getting online. Using 802.11b, an unlicensed radio spectrum, this antenna allows a computer to connect to the Internet (or any other computer network), much in the way a cell phone connects to the phone system. Since 802.11b is an unlicensed spectrum, Meehan didn't have to pay any fees to the Federal Communications Commission before he took a stroll down to Baker Beach, hooked up his antenna to a laptop, and pointing it at the antenna on his roof, used his home Internet connection to surf the Web from a mile and a half away. Later he went to the top of a hill in San Bruno, five miles from his house, and repeated the experiment. It worked.

And that's not good news for companies like AT&T. Because Meehan isn't the only one who can surf the Web with a tin-can antenna: in fact, anyone with an unobstructed view of Meehan's house can point one of these cheap devices at it and share his high-speed Internet access – for free. If the practice spreads – and Meehan hopes it will – why would anyone want to pay for expensive Internet service from companies like AT&T?

That is exactly what AT&T is afraid you'll ask, and it's why the company and others like it have taken steps to block their customers from setting up publicly accessible wireless networks like Meehan's. Since, under AT&T's franchise agreement with the city of San Francisco, the corporation will soon own most of the fiber-optic cable that provides speedy Internet service to the city, AT&T's policies could spell doom for the city's burgeoning wireless community networks.

Or, if city officials intervene, the nonprofit, grassroots wireless networks could spell doom for AT&T's monopoly.

After writing about his antenna on Slashdot, Meehan found himself becoming a culture hero of sorts. He began to get e-mails from other people who had been doing their own experiments with 802.11b networks, also known as Wi-Fi. Many had fairly large antennae and powerful "wireless access points," the hardware required to turn a wired Internet connection into a wireless one. "I'm in South of Market," a typical e-mail reads. "I have line of sight to your house and to two of my friends who also have access points."

What if all these dispersed geeks with their access points and antennae got together and created a huge, citywide wireless network? Ordinary people could go online from cafés and street corners. Schools that couldn't afford to lay thousands of feet of expensive broadband cable could provide cheap wireless Internet access in all of their classrooms. So could nonprofit organizations. Libraries could offer wireless access to people in low-income neighborhoods. For Meehan, the idea seems like a neat tech project – and for many other people who've gotten involved, the idea sounds like social justice.

To bring San Francisco into the wireless age, Meehan started a mailing list last month called San Francisco Wireless Broadband (SFWBB), a group for people who want to plan a community wireless network. One member is already creating a topographical map online so SFWBB can figure out how to deal with mountains and high buildings that cut off 802.11b signals. And Jamie Zawinksi, geek bad-boy owner of the DNA Lounge, has pledged his rooftop antenna to the cause, if SFWBB can figure out a way to keep users from sucking up all his bandwidth.

But SFWBB is just the thin end of the wedge. Wireless community groups like the Bay Area Wireless User Group (BAWUG) and S.F. Wireless have been spawning similar projects for the past couple of years. Members of S.F. Wireless have helped residents of the Inner Sunset neighborhood set up what are called "hot spots," small areas of wireless Internet coverage around their homes or businesses. If you hook up an antenna to your laptop and take a cruise around the neighborhood between 9th Avenue and Irving, you'll pick up dozens of publicly accessible wireless networks – including my own. Surf and Sip, a San Francisco business, has also been installing hot spots in cafés across the country where users pay a small fee to gain wireless access.

In New York a wireless community group has turned several parks into free hot spots for the public. And in Seattle similar groups are planning a citywide wireless network. According to a survey conducted by Cahners In-Stat Group, this year Americans have already spent $2.4 billion setting up Wi-Fi. Why isn't San Francisco, one of the most computer-savvy cities in the world, taking advantage of a technology so many of its citizens already have?

The robber barons of broadband

Although the dot-com boom brought with it endless stories about how the Internet would be a great democratic tool, bringing everyone into electronic town halls, the reality is that getting online costs money. The cost of computers has come down dramatically, but to get decent dial-up Internet access you'll probably find yourself paying about $25 a month for a services like Earthlink and AOL. The formerly free Internet has become big business. Nielsen NetRatings estimates there are 165,745,689 people with Internet access in the United States alone. Multiply that number by $25 a month, and you get an industry that's raking in almost $50 billion a year on access charges alone.

These days dial-up services – where you use your telephone line to go on the Net – are being replaced by broadband, a far more expensive way to get online. There's a simple reason why people are switching to broadband. Dial-up modems are just not fast enough to allow you to download songs, look at pictures, and watch movies online.

Sometimes called "high-speed Internet," broadband refers to services like cable modems, DSL, and T1. While a dial-up delivers 56,000 bits of data a second, a typical cable broadband line delivers roughly 1 million bits a second, making it about 20 times faster than a dial-up. A 56KB modem, for instance, might take three hours to download one Metallica song. A broadband connection lets you download that song in less than 10 minutes.

Broadband is delivered through the same kinds of cables that bring you cable television, so it's also quite convenient for people who don't want to unplug their phones every time they go online.

According to Neilsen NetRatings, there are currently 1,110,000 broadband users in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a huge number for a single region – the area is ranked fourth in the nation for broadband use – and customers are paying anywhere from $50 to $100 each month to their broadband providers. Those costs don't include installation fees, which can go upward of $300. Clearly, the broadband industry – led by corporations like AT&T and Verizon – is worth billions of dollars. And the broadband robber barons always want more.

One obvious way to secure more customers is to be the only broadband business in town with access to a network of wires that can carry data at high speeds. The most popular type of wire for this is called fiber optic. Made of hundreds of glass fibers, a fiber optic cable can carry digital data at blistering speeds. Fiber optic is also highly versatile: the same wire might be bringing you cable television data, Internet data, and telephone calls all at the same time. Not surprisingly, companies like AT&T that want to corner the communications market are very interested in fiber optics (DSL companies, on the other hand, use already-existing phone lines). If broadband providers can buy fiber optic networks, they can control the hardware that brings you everything from Six Feet Under on HBO to phone calls from your boyfriend.

In San Francisco this is the exact situation broadband customers are facing. Broadband provider AT&T has a franchise deal with the city that grants the company total control over the city's fiber optic network – all AT&T has to do is lay the cables. To grasp what this means, you might imagine that cables are like pipes. What San Francisco is saying is that if AT&T lays a bunch of pipe, it also has the power to control everything that goes through the pipes. So every time you flush your toilet, you pay AT&T for the privilege of using its pipes to whisk your shit out to the sewage plant. And even though most people use only a fraction of the space available in its broadband "pipes" – that is, the available bandwidth – AT&T doesn't want you to share that extra space with anyone who isn't a paying customer of AT&T.

People like Meehan who are part of wireless community groups want to share the pipes. And that's what pisses off AT&T. Despite the fact that fiber optic cables can technically deliver enough bandwidth to fuel fairly huge wireless networks without degrading the quality of service, the company has specific rules in its service agreements banning customers from setting up networks like the ones Meehan has in mind. If the company gets control of all of the high-speed cable access in the city – and the city allows that ban on sharing bandwidth to stand – Meehan's dream will be a lot harder to realize.

Wireless community groups aren't arguing that people shouldn't have to pay the company that is giving them broadband. Nor are they trying to resell broadband access to other people. They just want to share some of the broadband they've paid for – in the same way you might give your neighbor a glass of water out of the pipes you've paid to use, or let a friend use your toilet without paying for every flush.

Franchise woes

There is a confusing disconnect between wireless community groups and the city of San Francisco. Despite the efforts of BAWUG founding member Tim Pozar, who has some very good ideas about how the city might benefit from its own wireless network, it's as if the city's Telecommunications Commission and groups like SFWBB are on different planets.

The existence of community Wi-Fi could be a serious challenge to the city's franchise deal with AT&T – a challenge that comes at a fairly opportune moment. The City Attorney's Office and the Department of Information and Telecommunications (DTIS) are currently investigating whether San Francisco's multimillion-dollar franchise deal with AT&T should be renegotiated based on several questionable moves made by the company over the last several months (see "Poor Reception," 5/15/02).

But discussion of the ban on wireless networking isn't even on the city's radar.

In 1999 San Francisco made a deal with AT&T: the corporate giant would provide the city with a brand-new fiber optic cable network, and in return AT&T would become the city's main provider of cable television, as well as high-speed Internet. But Sup. Jake McGoldrick aide Jerry Threet says AT&T is already a year and a half behind on laying the fiber optic network. To make matters worse, AT&T subsidiary AT&T Broadband has announced it is taking the first steps toward merging with fellow broadband provider ComCast – meaning the franchise would suddenly be owned by another company. And the language of the city's deal says the franchise can't be transferred.

AT&T representative Andrew Johnson says the ComCast deal shouldn't affect the AT&T franchise with San Francisco. His company contends that the franchise is actually owned by Television Signal Corporation, which is in turn owned by AT&T, and that TSC is simply one of the assets that AT&T will bring to the ComCast deal. "The franchise language does not require municipal review of this change of control," Johnson says.

Members of several city departments aren't so sure this claim holds water. Deputy city attorney Julia Friedlander argues that the ComCast deal is indeed a transfer of ownership. "This is a hotly disputed issue," she says.

Making matters more complicated is a controversial FCC ruling that came down in March. According to Denise Brady, deputy director at the DTIS, "the FCC has classified cable modem as an information service, not as a cable or telecom service. This greatly confuses issues about which regulations and laws will apply [to Internet broadband]. If indeed cable modems are information services, they are no longer covered under our franchise agreement with AT&T."

In fact, if the FCC ruling survives several suits challenging it at the state level, Brady worries it will mean an end to local and federal regulation of the Internet broadband industry. That could leave the city no legal ability to challenge unfair corporate regulations governing broadband Internet use.

Wireless geeks to the rescue

If the corporate monopolies can be kept from controlling broadband, the potential benefits are huge.

BAWUG's Pozar runs a nonprofit organization called Bay Area Regional Wireless Network, whose funding has so far come out of his own pockets and those of a few friends. A longtime media activist and microwave engineer who has in the past set up community radio stations and local Internet service providers, Pozar now wants to bring wireless access to Bay Area citizens and their public safety departments.

Using powerful antennae and experimental equipment partly of his own design, Pozar proposes to create a high-speed wireless "backbone" that would deliver signals from mountaintop to mountaintop and then down into the cities below. "Because I've worked in broadcasting for so long, I have a lot of friends who have mountaintops or access to them," Pozar says.

So far, the experiment looks like it could work. Pozar's group has already established a wireless link between Hayward and Sign Hill, the hill in San Bruno that boasts the South San Francisco sign. With some fine tuning and a willing broadband provider, this link might in time provide coverage to people in the surrounding areas.

More important, Pozar wants to provide cities with wireless broadband for public safety. Currently he's talking with the county of San Mateo about offering the service to the police and fire departments. This would be invaluable because right now emergency services don't have any access to high-speed data. Safety workers in the field can't download pictures or maps. With Pozar's wireless system in place, firefighters could be downloading real-time aerial images of the fire they're fighting, allowing them to strategize more quickly about the best way to put it out. Police could download photos of suspects or other information they need within seconds. "We want to work closely with local emergency departments and find out what their exact needs are so we can experiment and put together the best possible wireless system for them," Pozar says.

Pozar has even more radical ideas about what he could do for the city of San Francisco. He wants to create a San Francisco wireless network, kind of like a mini-Internet that serves only city residents. "This wouldn't be about connecting to the Internet, but to each other as a community," he says. Using wireless, San Francisco residents could set up their computers to share resources like printers and hard-drive space. They could also use the network for making local phone calls. "The network would let you circumvent the telephone company," Pozar adds. People could also have Web sites on the network and set up local file-sharing systems like Napster so they could share their band's new music with everyone in San Francisco who cared to download it. Pozar is careful to explain that this wouldn't be about stealing bandwidth from Internet broadband providers. "The Internet costs money," he says. "You'd get access to the local San Francisco network for free. But to go on the Internet, I could imagine setting up a co-op where you'd pay into a kitty and share costs with several people for Internet broadband access."

If San Francisco were to work with community wireless groups to set up such a network, it would be the first municipal wireless network of its kind. And it wouldn't be a surprising development, since San Francisco is one of the most wired cities in the country – and one of the most techno-savvy.

But as long as the city isn't able to regulate Internet broadband, it's unlikely that Pozar's vision will ever come to pass. If indeed the city franchise with AT&T includes Internet broadband, the city needs to renegotiate that franchise so that broadband customers can set up community wireless networks. If the FCC ruling holds, and Internet broadband goes unregulated, then it's up to lawmakers to challenge the FCC so that cities can provide their citizens and public safety departments with the low-cost, high-speed access they need and deserve.

Already there are broadband providers like Seattle's Speakeasy.net that allow their DSL customers to set up wireless networks. Speakeasy's philosophy is that broadband customers should be allowed to do what they like with services they pay for. "We're not here to police our customers," Speakeasy CEO Mike Apgar says. "We want our customers to explore what's possible with broadband, and we've never had any trouble at all with wireless customers. Some use a lot of bandwidth, but our business model accounts for people doing that."

Meanwhile, wireless community groups like Seattle Wireless and New York Wireless – as well as Sonoma County's NoCat – are busily setting up free, publicly accessible wireless networks in their local areas. No matter what AT&T does, the push for community wireless isn't going away.

Perhaps the greatest weapon the wireless groups have, which AT&T doesn't, is their commitment to community. "I'm not hoping to get any money out of my project," Pozar says. "We're a nonprofit. I just want to do good work. This grows out of my work with community radio stations. Back then, I founded those stations to create a better world through democratic communication. And that's what I'm trying to do now."

E-mail Annalee Newitz at annalee@techsploitation.com.