The BBC covers rural broadband via wireless efforts in BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband entrepreneurs wire the nation [from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - Linksys Power Booster Unplugged

According to this, the Linksys Amplifier has been pulled from the market because the FCC are concerned it could be used with non-Linksys APs. The problem is the FCC regs that say that a complete system including antenna must be tested end to end to make sure it doesn't break the power rules. I can't help thinking that there's something wrong here. This is an attempt to regulate the market at the supply end when the devices are now a commodity. All it's done is result in a proliferation of odd connectors from the manufacturers while vaguely "illegal" antennas and amps are freely available. it can be hard but all the odd connectors are also freely available making home builds easy as well. The alternative of policing finished rigs that break the rules and cause interference is much more difficult.

The situation in the UK and Europe is much the same but with dramatically lower power output limits. It's even easier to put together a rig that breaks those rules just by buying or building a moderate gain antenna and attaching it to an approved device.

The real story here is that you should always go for a higher gain antenna over an amplifier as the narrower beamwidth is less likely to cause interference, while the receive gain is likely to be much more. So taking the amps off the market is actually doing everyone a favour. [from: JB Wifi]

BT! and! Yahoo! in! BB! marriage!

Goodbye "BT Openworld", hello "BT Yahoo! Broadband"

I have to wonder why. But then I'm one of those reactionary old bigots who thinks that the killer broadband app is the Internet. And that captive portals and broadband "launch pads" are hopelessly 1997. Hopefully BT Retail's "no frills" broadband only offering won't change except maybe to go down in price. Talking of which, where are the consumer retail price cuts? [from: JB Ecademy]

Another blog search tool has appeared with some funky features and featured funk. Here's the profile page for Ecademy. BlogStreet : Blog Home [from: JB Ecademy]

This is one of those posts about business ideas that might as well be a Lazyweb request. I'll toss it out because I'd really like it to happen in the real world and I'm unlikely to make it happen myself. But if you pick it up and run with it, offer me a job, ok! At the moment it's one of those dotcom business plans Step1) Have Idea. Step 2) ????. Step3) Make Loadsamoney!

Ever since I first discovered computer adventure games, RPGs (Role Playing Games) and MMRPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Paying Games) I wanted them to leak out into the real world. I wanted some of the puzzles and clues to be out there in the real world, eg "Go to Reality Checkpoint at 7:07 on 7-7 and get X" or "23rd word, pg23, penguin edition of Decline and Fall". Then I came across a group in Finland who had combined Dungeons and Dragons, SMS, paintball and the primitive geo-location of cellphones to make an online game where you picked up virtual weapons at specific locations and attacked people who were physically near you all via SMS.

Yesterday, I heard about an ICA experiment that unfortunately has just finished. "Uncle Roy Is All Around You is a game to be played in the streets of London: Street Players search for Uncle Roy through the back streets, the tourist traps and the leafy boulevards of Westminster with a handheld computer. Online Players cruise through a virtual model of the same area, searching for the Street Players and looking for leads that will help them find Uncle Roy. Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together. They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking..."

Today, I came across a Multi-level marketing group called C4 Game Club that among other things is franchising WiFi hotspot equipment specifically aimed at people who want to have LAN Party group gaming sessions (Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal, Quake etc) in public places.

Then there's those TV programmes with the gorgeous Suzy Perry racing about and being directed by people in the studio trying to solve puzzles.

So I'm putting all this together and seeing the potential for a game that involves roaming yoof armed with camera cellphones, WiFi/GPRS connected PDAs and such like, playing interactively with people who are broadband connected but at home and/or laptop connected and at a WiFi hotspot. Mix in a bit of the background from the Playstation game "The Getaway". Add IM, VoIP, speech synthesis and a soundtrack. You'd have online people communicating and directing offline people and vice versa, working in teams and in real time.

Somebody please build this. I want to play it. [from: JB Ecademy]

BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband black spots still rife : There is still a huge disparity between the town and country when it comes to access to fast net services. The road to broadband is a long one for remoter areas of the UK. Despite the fact that two million people in the UK are accessing the net at high-speed, there are still plenty of broadband black spots.

And you don't have to be very far out in the country. My good friend Leon is maybe 5 miles from the M25 and 2 miles from the A1. All the nearest towns are broadband enabled, but he's just outside the distance limit. Then there's most of Milton Keynes as blogged previously. There has to be an economic solution to this that benefits both the provider and customer. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's been a few cases where people have complained that they have received spam from either outsiders or Ecademy members, direct to their email address. Let me clarify what currently happens.

The email address that Ecademy holds is optionally displayed on your profile.
- The default is that the email address is not shown. If you want to show your email address you have to enable it. Now if people then send you email, why are you complaining!?!
- The profile page is visible to non-members (the word at large) but even if you have enabled display of your email address, it's not shown.
- Ecademy never gives out the email addresses and I don't believe the database has been accessed directly.
- We are considering tightening this further so that even if you mark your email address as displayed it's only shown to power networkers. I'm not sure this is either necessary or desirable.
- And finally, beware the effects of the current crop of email viruses and worms. These take random from and to addresses from people's address book and construct an email subject and body from text it finds that often look quite real. So you can get email from someone that looks as though it came from Ecademy or via Ecademy, when in fact it came from an infected 3rd party that knows both you and Ecademy.

One related area. When someone leaves a message the recipient (optionally) gets a notification. When the target is a power networker they get the full text of the message and the reply-to is set to the email address of the author. This is a convenience for power networkers but it's also a leak of email address information from Ecademy. I like it the way it is, but if enough people dislike it, I'll go back to a reply-to address of webmaster@ecademy.com. It's just that I was receiving way too many replies that were obviously meant for the original author and I don't have the time to redirect these. [from: JB Ecademy]

Over the last year we've had 524 people who've posted a blog entry on Ecademy. So clearly there's quite a lot of people who "get it". Something I've been puzzling over is to try and understand what happens when a significant proportion of you spin out of here and start a full blown weblog of your own. I know there's a few who either already had a blog when they joined or started one some time ago. Now how would it work if all 524 had their own blog elsewhere as well as posting here?

There's actually some critical issues here about the tension between the two trends towards centralization and de-centralization that constantly work against each other. Ecademy gets it's strength from aggregating large numbers of people into one place. But this necessarily limits the individuals because we can't provide everything you need. We're already seeing this in the Clubs where one or two of them are on the verge of spinning away as they have reached the point where they can survive independently of Ecademy and they need facilities and function that we may not be able to provide.

What might happen here is that one aspect of Ecademy turns into a loose cloud of related websites. If this happened I'd want to see tools that made it easy to cross post to both your website and Ecademy. I'd like to see copious blogrolls, links and trackbacks between all the sites. And ideally I'd like to see the ability to continue discussions across all the sites without being specifically aware of where the comments thread started. Perhaps we could have a section of Dailenews that aggregated the posts from all the Ecademy family blogs? And of course, I'd like to see links back to Ecademy on all these sites, ideally with logos.

Looking even further out there, perhaps in FOAF, there's potential for de-centralizing the network message part of Ecademy.

But I'm also very aware, that the side effect of breaking apart what we have into many small loosely coupled parts is that we lose the sense of belonging. Not to mention the effect on our Alexa ranking (!) and ability to keep on growing.

If you'd like to discuss this further and especially if you already run an off-Ecademy weblog, join the Bloggers Club and let's have at it. [from: JB Ecademy]

A Trackback driven collection of weblogs that are blogging the 'weblog_business_strategies_conference' happening now in Boston. More self-referential than the worm ourobouros (that ate it's own tail).

Damn, these people are full of it! [from: JB Ecademy]

Slashdot | Is Linksys Violating The GPL?

Very interesting article that claims that Linksys (and several other WiFi router mfgs) are using Linux in their 802.11g APs (like the WRT54G) without admitting that fact and without following the GPL and distributing source. I should add that it's not at all clear if they are in fact violating GPL although the author of one utility that is included is starting the legal process to get some clarification from them.

But much more interesting is that there are apparently device drivers for all the Broadcom chip based 802.11g hardware reference designs. This is critical because all the most interesting work on Mesh networks is being done on Linux. And right now there are no public Linux drivers for any Broadcom, Intel or TI chip based designs. [from: JB Wifi]

A concise and funny History Of The Internet :
1996: Instant messaging created as a way for people all over the world to interrupt each other. [from: JB Ecademy]

Detailed whitepaper on building a large Rural WiFi network. Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control and Accounting It's also on Slashdot. [from: JB Wifi]

The Register has another article on how a government consultation on the introduction of ID, sorry, entitlement cards magically collapsed 5000 individual online objections into a single petition. They then refused both a request for the actual statistics and still haven't answered a similar question in the house. Meanwhile the reasons now being put forward for the ID cards are different from the reasons that were the subject of the consultation.

Don't you just love representational democracy? [from: JB Ecademy]

ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - Virgin leaps on board with Wi-Fi : Broadreach operates a total of 50 Wi-Fi hot spots in the UK at the present time. Access at all of them -- including Euston, and Birmingham International and Manchester Piccadilly when launched -- is currently free, but charges are likely to be introduced in the future.

I'm convinced that long distance train services are a killer hotspot location. It'll be very interesting to see how Broadreach get the bandwidth onto the train. [from: JB Wifi]

A piece from a comment today.

I've said this before. And I have to preface this by saying that it's my opinion.

I think that where this starts is that Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) was a puzzle piece in the grand game. It was to the USA's and UK's advantage to get Saddam out of the way and to get control of Iraq's territory. It would mean greater control over the oil price. It would mean being able to get US troops out of Saudi by providing an alternate friendly base in the area. This in turn would allow the middle East peace process to be kick started while returning Iraq to the role of buffer zone against Syria, Palestine, Turkey and Iran. So lots of politically good reasons. But stuck in the way were both the UN and domestic populations who were not totally enthusiastic.

This is the point where we move from Global political strategy into Realpolitique, SNAFU and FUBAR. Saddam probably had a WMD program once, supplied by the West. His minions screwed up but didn't tell anyone, least of all their superiors to avoid getting killed. Defectors told the West what they wanted to hear. The pro-war elements in West politics (The Neo-Cons) brow-beat the intelligence agencies into phrasing their reports in a way that gave the politicians an excuse. Various intelligence agency operatives took whatever they could cobble together (like plagiarism of 10 year old academic papers) and turned them into briefing papers. The speech writers and PAs to the figureheads further took the summaries of these and twisted them into sound bites that would make the evening news. Finally, Blair and Bush delivered these speeches. With all the political manouvering at the same time in the UN and within their own countries, this was just enough to get away with a War that otherwise would have been impossible as it would have broken so many international treaties and institutions.

Now that chain of lying, half truths, plagiarism, management summaries, spin and rhetoric represents a long, long trip from truth on the ground and polictical will to what we finally heard.

But what is really puzzling is that Bush and Blair had to go so far out on a limb as to say that they had "Firm, verified reports" that Saddam could "launch WMD at 45 minutes notice". That looks like desperation politics with an extreme risk of being found out if it wasn't true. No politician would ever make those kind of definite statements unless they were absolutely certain, or their backs were right up against the wall. And given that there is still no proof that it was true, I think we have to assume that it was the second.

So it's at least possible that Bush and Blair weren't lying and that they actually believed this at the time. In which case the likelihood is that their information was just plain wrong. More worrying and what will come back to bite them is that they viewed the greater prize to be worth a little short term lying. It was a calculated risk based on information they had that they knew was flawed but might have been true. And now they believe that they can wriggle out of any fallout if it really does turn out that they were wrong.

So there you have it, that's my opinion, which counts for nothing. Will it bring down Blair, Bush and the Neo-Cons? Maybe, but probably not. Do the fabled WMDs exist? Maybe, but probably not. Will any of those people be tried for what they said and did under international law. Definitely not. Will Iraq become the educated, rational, successful society and economy that it could be in the next 20 years? I doubt it. Far more likely is a continuous bloody civil war between all the different factions kept more or less under control by an occupying western force, ostensibly there to protect the oil companies and military airfields.

Cynical? Moi? With this T-shirt on and my reputation?

In a previous blog today, I touched on the idea that the Government should encourage rural broadband development and fibre to the home by offering tax credits and subsidies to companies that invested in this infrastructure. I think this touches on a much wider theme about the role of government in encouraging infrastructure investment in the UK (and elsewhere).

I would like to see an approach that is slightly different to the current one. It seems that whenever Government attempts to build infrastructure directly in current times, the result is cost overruns, time overruns and occasionally complete failure. But private business does not have enough incentive to take on long term capital investment particularly in national infrastructure projects.

So I would like to see a system of tax credits that rewards projects that are judged to be in the interests of national infrastructure. And I'd go further than that. Instead of also creating more or less temporary monopolies around these to provide a long term ROI, provide tax credits against income derived by sub-leasing the resulting capacity.

In broadband terms this would mean that BT, energy distribution companies, and anyone else who wanted to play would get very high tax relief against the capital cost of providing backhaul bandwidth to local rural exchanges. They could then sell this capacity on to the highest bidder (BT, ISPs etc) with tax relief on the income generated. Alongside this, Telcos, cable companies, utilities would all have a similar incentive to lay star-wired fibre to the home with the similar tax relief on income from selling it on to bandwidth management companies such as other telcos, ISPs, video delivery companies and so on.

The end result is a boost to the economy from the increase in infrastructure and the new businesses that grow up to exploit it, at no direct cost to the government since the tax lost is on capital spending that would not have been done otherwise. And hence there's no direct cost to the tax payer. By reducing regulation on the exploitation of the infrastructure it avoids the endless wrangling and errors involved in government sanctioned temporary monopolies by letting the market decide how best to share the spoils.

I've used Broadband as an example here, but I think the basic approach would work in may other areas. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just written a blog on the main site about the next Next Big Thing that touches on some WiFi issues.
Here are the key WiFi bits

WiFi sharing friendly ISPs appear that positively encourage sharing bandwidth with your neighbours
MyZones is perhaps the first in the UK. They are bundling ADSL Broadband provision with a managed WiFi access point/router and encouraging you to sub-contract the capacity with your neighbours. This turns the usual broadband company and it's T&Cs on it's head. Does this business plan make sense?

Microsoft build WiFi mesh-networking into the Windows network stack and their next 802.11g WiFi hardware. There are rumours that MS is very interested in mesh networking and WiFi. Their MS branded WiFi equipment badly needs an upgrade to bring it inline with the 802.11g standard so they're on the verge of a new product in the hardware cycle. They have complete control over the networking layer in Windows. Could they build mesh networking into the Windows networking stack? This raises another question. Mesh networking is clearly an idea who's time has come. There's a killer app in being able to merge the capacity in yours and your next door neighbour's broadband line to get double the burstable rate. And yet it seems to be extremely hard. IMHO none of the current efforts in this area (Locustworld, Meshnetworks, SOWN) are anywhere near prime time. There are major roadblocks in the form of IP allocation, standard routing protocol, missing Linux drivers, missing support in current hardware. What's it going to take to make Mesh-Networking mainstream?

Major cities are covered by almost free WiFi. Put the first two together and it could be routine for every ADSL customer to routinely share their bandwidth with guests. Add in rollout of hotspots by The Cloud, local councils, libraries, telcos, cafes, hotels etc etc. We're now right on the verge of public WiFi going from being a few isolated islands to being a merged all pervasive cloud. It's that moment when small pockets of infection turn into an epidemic. This isn't a pipe dream any more it's something forseeable in the near term future. This surely has major implications all over the place. Ubiquitous high speed internet access will bring qualitative changes in behaviour, not just quantitative. [from: JB Wifi]

I routinely post to many different content systems on the web. I'd like to aggregate all this into my blog. I suspect that I'm not the only person who would like to do this.[1]

So here's the Lazyweb request. To achieve this I think we need two things.

1) CMS systems should routinely provide an RSS feed that contains all the posts (Articles, main content, comments, forum entries etc) from a single specified person. ie me.

2) Blog systems (Blogger, MT, Radio, etc) should routinely provide a way of reading a specific set of named RSS feeds and translating/formatting them into blog entries automatically.

I'd actually like to include some mailing lists into this as well. The problem is that email is usually much less formatted than web CMS entries. However this brings to mind that EZMLM, Mailman, Listproc and
others don't (AFAIK) yet have RSS feeds. And the Yahoogroups RSS feeds are not really usable having no description/abstract and being empty for member view only lists. So here's the Lazyweb RSS evangelism call to get RSS output included in all the major mailing list engines and (again) to get Yahoogroups RSS feeds improved.

[1]I'm already doing this with everything I post on Ecademy getting mirrored to Voidstar. But it's incomplete. We've got at least three other people on Ecademy doing the same thing with their blogs. Having had this idea I think I'm going to write an extension in the Ecademy code to include all content types in a personal feed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a long piece about the implications of "Ubiquitous Internet" It was really an examination of then current trends trying to find the next "Next Big Thing". It's time to do the exercise again.

So what does the team think are the current technologies on the horizon that will have a major effect during the next year or so? Here's a few starters:-

UK Broadband drops below £20 pm and jumps to 10Mbps for £30 pm

WiFi sharing friendly ISPs appear that positively encourage sharing bandwidth with your neighbours

Microsoft build WiFi mesh-networking into the Windows network stack and their next 802.11g WiFi hardware

Major cities are covered by almost free WiFi

The government introduces a tax credit and subsidy system to encourage fibre to rural exchanges, fibre to the home in urban areas and fibre to every school (providing the school shares the bandwidth with the local community).

VoIP becomes common

Music publishing exploits P2P sharing instead of fighting it by solving the quality problem.

Telecommuting for white collar workers becomes the norm for 1, then 2, then 4 days per week

A Linux distro aimed at the desktop finally becomes easy enough to use and install to be a viable alternative to Windows. A major high street PC supplier starts bundling it.

Market share of IE6 drops below 75%

An accounting package aimed at SMEs includes direct support for P2P electronic reconciliation, order passing and hence barter.

Spam represents more than 75% of all electronic mail and the global email system melts down.

Almost every Telco that spent money on the 3G auction spins off a 3G subsidiary that is allowed to die and default on it's debt. Vodaphone buys the remnants and diversifies into an airline and train company before buying Fiat.

IPv6 is acknowledged to be essential, but most analysts expect no major implementations outside SE Asia before 2010. [from: JB Ecademy]

So here's the NY Times reporting on a project in Manchester England to WiFi enable the whole city. I wouldn't normally do this but the NYT have a habit of moving stories to archive so if you don't read it quick it will have disappeared. Anyway, here's the full article, if they get upset, we'll take it down again. There's some really excellent quotes hidden away in here.

JB

With Wireless, an English City Reaches Across Digital Divide

With Wireless, an English City Reaches Across Digital Divide
By MARK LANDLER

ANCHESTER, England, May 29 — Three years ago, Shirley Hughes lived a life of dreary routine, collecting welfare checks, bringing up two children as a single mother, passing her evenings in front of the television.

Today, she teaches her neighbors how to use computers at a local college while studying for a teaching certificate. At home, she skips "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in favor of the Internet, which she surfs avidly, downloading patterns for patchwork quilts, her favorite hobby.

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Ms. Hughes's computer is connected to the Internet "24/7," as she puts it, through a technology known as Wi-Fi. For her, it has been a virtual passport out of the decaying industrial landscape of East Manchester, a place only now recovering from the end of history's last great commercial revolution.

Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, has generated a lot of excitement here and in the United States as a way to offer high-speed Internet access in airports, cafes, bars and restaurants — anywhere one finds a surfeit of laptop-toting customers and a scarcity of telephone jacks.

In Manchester, the once-grimy Victorian city famous as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Wi-Fi is being used, for the first time ever on this scale, as a way to bridge the digital divide.

"We wanted to give people access to the latest technology," said Sean McGonigle, a local official who led the effort to build a network in Manchester. "In our wildest dreams, we didn't envisage the impact it would have."

Ms. Hughes, 40, marvels at the changes in her life. "If not for this, I'd still be cleaning house," she said.

Unlike the latest third-generation, or 3G, cellular telephone technology, where European providers are ahead of their American counterparts, Europe trails the United States in the development of Wi-Fi. But there have been a raft of projects begun here in recent weeks, suggesting that Europe has caught the bug.

The International Data Corporation, a research firm, predicts that Europe will have 32,500 hubs, or "hot spots," by 2007, up from 1,083 sites at the end of 2002. They will generate a projected $1.4 billion in revenue.

For example, Paris is starting to construct a wireless network, using the Metro system, with its 400 stations, as a backbone. At the moment, Wi-Fi coverage is limited to a single bus route that connects two Paris train stations, the Gare du Nord and Porte d'Orleans.

Eventually, the Paris public transportation authority plans to install up to 10 radio antennas in every major Metro station, allowing riders to send e-mail or browse the Web while commuting to and from work.

Here in Manchester, by using radio transmitters and other wireless equipment supplied by Cisco Systems, the city has turned a six-square-mile area into a Wi-Fi hot spot. Residents can receive high-speed Internet access by mounting a small antenna on their homes and inserting a card into their PC's.

The network covers 4,500 houses, in a motley neighborhood that ranges from tidy terraced homes to bleak housing projects. About 730 homes have signed up for the service so far. Mr. McGonigle hopes to connect 1,500 homes by the end of the year, and 2,500 by the middle of 2004.

For £16, or $26.50 a month, people can have unlimited Internet access. A cheaper package, for £6, or $10, a month, gives access to a Web site called EastServe, which offers e-mail, online chat groups, and news and information tailored to East Manchester.

Comparable service by a telephone or cable company would cost $30 to $40 a month. And it would depend on whether these providers were willing or able to offer broadband access.

Cable operators have wired less than 10 percent of East Manchester because it remains an unappealing market. The BT Group, formerly British Telecommunications, can offer broadband access by upgrading its existing copper wires. The trouble is, a quarter of the residents here do not have phone service, either because they have been disconnected or rely exclusively on cellphones.

"We found that the gap between affluent and deprived areas has gotten wider with technology," Mr. McGonigle said.

Before this project, Wi-Fi was viewed less as a technology leveler than as a convenience for sophisticated techies. In its most visible incarnation — in airports, cafes, and the like — it offers business travelers and other switched-on types superfast Web access on the road.

Offices and factories also use Wi-Fi technology to create private communications networks. With new phones from Cisco and Motorola, people are even using it to make cellular calls.

At first, industry executives said, mobile phone providers in Europe viewed Wi-Fi as a threat to 3G, a more advanced technology in which they have invested billions of dollars for licenses. But as 3G has been delayed by financial and technical hurdles, some providers now view Wi-Fi as a potential stopgap technology, until 3G is ready.

"Now that they see it's going to happen anyway, they want to be involved," said George Polk, a Wi-Fi entrepreneur in London.

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Mr. Polk's company, Cloud, announced last month that it would turn 200 pubs into hot spots. It is the first phase of a plan to build a nationwide network, with 3,000 pubs and other public places.

Cloud will act as a wholesaler, selling access on the network to providers like BT Open Zone, a wireless subsidiary of the BT Group. Open Zone, in turn, will sell service, at a monthly subscription or hourly rates, to customers whose laptops are equipped with the necessary software.

Whether an English pub, with its jukebox and dartboards, is a suitable place for catching up on e-mail or surfing the Net is a debatable point. Mr. Polk insisted that pubs had become far more than watering holes in British society.

"It is the coffee shop of England," he said, evoking images of people pecking at their laptops while sipping a pint.

In Manchester, a local company, Netario Wireless, has installed hot spots in two of the city's most striking contemporary buildings: Bridgewater Hall, a performing arts center, and the Urbis museum, a sloping glass-encased structure with interactive exhibits on the world's great cities.

Philip T. Coen, Netario's enthusiastic chief executive, said he planned to build a Wi-Fi network so pervasive that it would transform central Manchester from a patchwork of hot spots into a "hot zone."

"If you can make deals with the right landowners," Mr. Coen said, pointing to the roofs of strategically situated buildings, "you can Wi-Fi a whole city, and there's nothing anybody can do about it."

Mr. Coen's approach may sound sly, but it merely reflects the technical realities of Wi-Fi. Because the radio signal carries in a radius of only about 100 to 150 feet, Wi-Fi providers typically cut deals with the proprietors of bars and cafes to install their equipment in each establishment.

By mounting antennas on the roofs of buildings across the street from popular meeting places, Mr. Coen hopes to be able to offer service without having to hustle for every bar owner or restaurateur.

"The urban solution is far more demanding," said Alan Salisbury, a consultant at Gaia Technologies, a Welsh company that designed the network in East Manchester. "We feel it's more suitable for rural areas."

Among Gaia's other projects are a network connecting three rural villages in Cumbria, in northwestern England, and a system that offers Internet access and e-mail to 300 schools in Wales.

Cisco is supplying equipment to a Wi-Fi project in Somiedo, a Spanish village so isolated that it gets its primary Internet connection via satellite. It is then beamed across the town by Wi-Fi antennas.

East Manchester did not face that hurdle. The challenge here was figuring out how to surmount a jagged landscape that mixes two- and three-story brick houses, towering trees and vast empty spaces where 19th-century steel mills and housing once stood.

The project's manager, Bob Jonas, mounted a small forest of antennas on top of four apartment towers on each corner of East Manchester. Two of the four receive the Internet through fiber optic wire.

From there, a radio signal is beamed to schools and Internet cafes, as well as to other rooftop antennas, which act as distribution points, relaying the signal to individual houses. Though homes do not have to be in direct line of sight of an antenna to receive the signal, an unobstructed path is helpful.

"It's very difficult to get a strong enough radio signal," said Mr. Jonas, who is trained as a radio engineer.

Signing up enough subscribers to make the network sustainable is an even greater challenge. Manchester subsidized the sale of 3,500 computers to residents, the vast majority of whom have never owned one.

But the service rollout has not been as rapid as Mr. Jonas would have liked, partly because of technical problems. Though the network has cost $2.4 million — a paltry sum by industry standards — Mr. Jonas knows that the pot of public money in Manchester is not bottomless.

What gives him confidence is the palpable social effect the Internet has had on the economically downtrodden people of East Manchester. The chat groups on the EastServe Web site crackle with debates, ranging from whether Britain should adopt the euro to the proposed design