Surf's up at Lake Wyola
from Greenfield (MA) Recorder

SHUTESBURY - What could be simpler than the image of sandal-clad Paul Borneo at the Lake Wyola dam, surfing the World Wide Web on his laptop?

In fact, Borneo could be a poster boy for just how easy it can be to bring high-speed Internet access to an out-of-the way setting. With a little ingenuity, off-the-shelf technology and community organizing, he's done just that - for himself and a couple dozen neighbors in this rural corner of Shutesbury.

Borneo's Wyola.Net is a free - yes, free - wireless-based alternative to slower, dial-up Internet service that's been available up to now. It's also a model to other communities to patch together their own quick and easy, low-cost, high-tech solutions.

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"It's like a string with tin cans, except we're finding it pretty reliable and fast," said Borneo, a software developer who got the idea for a community network a couple of years ago because slow, dial-up Internet service meant he'd have to drive to Amherst to download files.

"There was nothing available until we did something about it," said Borneo, who has lived around the lake for about three years and was frustrated by "abysmal" options: no cable service or digital subscriber line, and modems that operated at half-speed because of poor phone connections.

In January, he talked a friend about a mile away over the town line in Amherst to sign up with Choice One for a 900-kilobit-per-second business line that is available in Amherst but not Shutesbury, for $250 a month. Then, Borneo began seeking neighbors who wanted to pitch in $50 to share three months of service. Then he extended his friend's high-speed land line into their neighborhood by a wireless network transmitter.

"I said, 'I've got to do this,' and I started knocking on my neighbors' doors. After several weekends of knocking, I got enough people to write me checks to buy the first nine radios and eight antennas, plus Tupperware containers to put cable outdoors."

Now the lake area is bathed in a wireless signal, and smaller wireless zones are being created farther back from the lake by a combination of ethernet cable and wireless signal repeaters that target specific pockets of homes. Some people choose to bring the signal through their homes by cable and others simply equip their home computers to take advantage of the wireless signal.

Borneo spent $2,000 for equipment and began designing a system that he makes available to everyone around the lake for free - although those who can are invited to pitch in to defray costs.

Beginning in early April, the system was up and running.

"For me, it feels like a very American, roll-up-your-sleeve, pioneering ingenuity," said user Mark Roblee, who with his wife had to move their software and clothing businesses to Amherst three years ago to access a digital subscriber line. "We moved it home as fast as we could. This is way faster than DSL... and we save a lot in overhead.

"This is like the modern version of having the Yankee ingenuity of a farmer, but we're tilling cyber-fields."

Borneo sees the patchwork, low-cost system as an interim solution until a Shutesbury-Leverett Broadband Group is able to build a $3- to 5-million fiber-optic network that could deliver 3-megabit Internet connections, along with cable television, unlimited long distance, voice-over-Internet phone service and multiple phone lines.

"This is an effort to come up with at least some solution that can carry us through until fiber comes to town in two or three years," said Borneo. "We may wind up leaving the wireless system up because it's nice to have an open wireless net in the village."

He's gotten so many inquiries from people in other sparsely served hilltowns about setting up similar networks that he decided this week to add this to the list of computer-related work he does for a living.

Residents elsewhere in Shutesbury and neighboring Leverett banded together last year to leapfrog a two-county effort to bring high-speed Internet access to remote areas of the region. It was an example of the fast-changing technology that was morphing because of innovation and grass-roots enterprise.

Residents elsewhere in Shutesbury and neighboring Leverett banded together last year to build a fiber-optic network to provide both towns with 3-megabit Internet connections, cable television, unlimited long distance, voice-over-Internet phone service and multiple phone lines.

That grass-roots effort has applied for a $4 million, low-interest federal loan. But there's no feeling that Borneo's Wyola network is competing.

"We're very psyched for Paul, and they're psyched for us," said Aron Goldman, who's spearheaded the two-town project. We're trying to figure out how we can all work together. I'd sign up if I were in their catchment area."

Borneo, who figured he needed 17 paying households to make his wireless network pay for itself, says he's close to that now, out of 23 that receive the service.

Those users - including some who Borneo has physically connected using cable with ethernet connectors as well as the $75 programmable transmitters - include four home businesses.

There's a wireless transmitter that bounces the original service down to the lake, as well as three transmitters with directional antennas to beam the signal across to different clusters of houses around the lake, and repeaters to extend the network's reach. Borneo, with a www.wyola.net World Wide Web site, figures he has about 80 percent of the lake covered.

"A couple of weeks ago, we did a segment that runs by my house and serves six houses," he said. "That's pretty cool: It took two person-days and all it cost was 700 bucks in hardware. We're getting a bunch of people online without having to wait for putting fiber up on poles."

There are some limitations, he acknowledged, like asking users to limit their demand of bandwidth, particularly during daytime hours. The system shares the equivalent of half a T-1 line.

"There's value in having a nice snappy line," he said. "If you get a bunch of teenagers doing file-sharing, it won't feel that snappy. We all have to cooperate to keep the line from getting bogged down. So far, we've had no problems."

It's also taken some tweaking, such as adjusting antennas as trees leafed out so their "line of sight" wasn't blocked.

But for the most part, Wyola.net works as a community-building effort, paid for by donation and not subject to the restrictions of a commercial network.

"As time goes on and people get more interested in high-speed service, we'll have people joining in neighborhoods where we don't have full participation right now," he said.

posted by prof_booty | 09:58 AM