Since prices for 802.11 (primarily 802.11b) network cards have fallen we now believe that community networking is within the reach of most people with a technical bent. As such we are trying to organize these people into a cohesive unit.
There is lots more information (both general and technical) on our links page. A good technical overview of how 802.11b works and what it provides for is available (in pdf format). For the new comers and not so technical people here is a general overview of 802.11b and why we're excited about it.
- It is a standard. There is no single company or project you need to rely on.
There is good Linux and BSD support for 802.11b, especially for the Lucent Orinoco cards (and their predecesor WaveLan).
It has primitive support for encryption and authentication via WEP (wireless encryption protocol). Unfortunately standard WEP only supports a 40 bit shared key (many vendors have proprietary extensions to improve this but they aren't inter-operable). This is a better then nothing but not particularly useful in a community network setting. Because of the limitations of WEP we are looking into using IPSec and a CaptivePortal system for security and authentication.
The PersonalTelco project is community based and driven, our role in this is to provide documentation and technical/moral support to help you set up your own wireless community. This means is that everyone that is interested should find other people near to them that are interested and create a community network, we have a list of PortlandWirelessCommunities and WirelessCommunities in general. Once you have this working the next step is to connect to someone else's network. As more and more people succeed in doing this our network will reach farther and farther and become more and more reliable (due to the network becoming meshed).