Community Wireless Networks: A Darknet of Light
The MIT Press eBooks · 2022
Almost ten years prior to the emergence of the global open hardware movement, a local open hardware project called "Ronja" flourished in the Czech Republic.Ronja was a mechanical device for connecting computers point to point with visible, red light.The technical term for "blinking" data is "free space optics" (FSO).The home-built FSO technology provided the backbone for many community Wi-Fi networks in central and eastern Europe during the early 2000s.The wider political aspirations invested in the diffusion of this communications technology are nicely captured by an anecdote about a minor deviation in the design of Ronja.Many of Ronja's users, often teenagers and students, lived in communally governed tower blocks.Their older neighbors did not always appreciate the light show on the rooftops.Being in control over the local housing committees, the neighbors had the authority to tell the young residents to take down their devices from the building.This happened frequently enough to encourage the participants in the wireless network community to investigate a technical solution to the problem.They developed a modified version of Ronja that henceforth was called "Inferno."It differed from the original design only in that the data was transmitted in the infrared rather than the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum.The technical performance in terms of speed and interference from rain or fog was equivalent.The advantage of operating in the infrared spectrum was that 3