Networking


The Genesis of Philippine Cyberspace

At the thirteenth anniversary celebration of the Philippine Internet, Dr. Rodolfo M. Villarica gives a trailblazer’s account of the Philippines’ path to cyberspace.

Joey Alarilla, who took this video of Dr. Villarica’s speech, hopes thirteen doesn’t turn out to be an unlucky number. I do not share that hope. The thirteenth year of Philippine cyberspace, the year twenty million Filipinos go online, will bring apocalyptic amounts of bad luck — to n00bs.

P2P Wi-Fi

Now here’s an interesting concept: public Wi-Fi not through a few expensive towers, but through a lot of cheap boxes.

Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities, and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive — course.

An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more than one household and can be installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.

Meraki Networks, a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer the prospect of providing an extremely inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. It does so with a radical inversion: rather than starting from outside the house and trying to send signals in, Meraki starts from the inside and sends signals out, to the neighbors.

Meraki does not wish to go into the Internet service provider business itself, but it aspires to equip any interested nontechnical person to become a “micro” service provider for his or her local community. If the provider wishes to use advertising to cover costs rather than charge an access fee, little would be needed in order to cover the minimal outlays for equipment and operations.

I like the idea of people consuming and providing bandwidth through these cheap little boxes. We’re already content prosumers; as hardware becomes as abundant as software, why not become access prosumers?