Wireless Nomad (wirelessnomad.com) was a
for-profit cooperative based in
Toronto,
Canada providing subscriber-owned home and business
Internet access
Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...
along with free
Wi-Fi wireless Internet access and music to over a hundred
nodes, making it the largest free Wi-Fi network in the country at the time.
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It was founded by
Steve Wilton and
Damien Fox
Damien Fox (born 1961 in Tullamore, County Offaly) is an Irish people, Irish sportsperson. The Gift as he is known on and off the field by his peers, plays hurling with his local club Tullamore GAA, Tullamore and was a member of the Offaly GAA, ...
in January 2005, and turned its
DSL internet connections over to private
ISP TekSavvy in March 2009.
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All WiFi nodes were subsequently shut down.
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Instead of using
Bell Sympatico
Bell Internet, originally and frequently still called Sympatico, is the residential Internet service provider (ISP) division of BCE Inc. As of May 3, 2012, Bell Internet had over 3 million subscribers in Ontario and Quebec, making it the larges ...
's or
Rogers Cable
Rogers Cable Inc. is Canada's largest cable television service provider with about 2.25 million television customers, and over 930,000 Internet subscribers, primarily in Southern & Eastern Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. Ro ...
's retail high-speed Internet access services to provide service to their
wireless access points, they were their own ISP under
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC; french: Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes, links=) is a public organization in Canada with mandate as a regulatory agency for broadcasti ...
(CRTC) rules that compel large providers like
Rogers and Bell to resell their
local loop cable and DSL circuits to smaller ISPs at a regulated (tariffed) price. At the time of its disbanding in mid-2009, WN charged
Can$36.95+
GST GST may refer to:
Taxes
* General sales tax
* Goods and Services Tax, the name for the value-added tax in several jurisdictions:
** Goods and services tax (Australia)
** Goods and Services Tax (Canada)
** Goods and Services Tax (Hong Kong)
** ...
per month to members who signed up for home Internet service (3~5 Mbit/s down/720 kbit/s up), which was less than Bell and Rogers charged for their high-speed Internet access service. WN Business service was $59.95 a month. Wireless Nomad was one of the few ISPs in Canada that did not ban its residential subscribers from operating servers.
Port 25 was also open for outgoing traffic.
The service covered several areas, mainly in downtown Toronto.
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In October 2006, inspired by the fictional narrative in
Cory Doctorow's
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
''Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town'' is a contemporary fantasy novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. It was published in June 2005, concurrently released on the Internet under a Creative Commons license, free for download in sever ...
, the co-op deployed a large antenna in Toronto's
Kensington Market, covering about one quarter of the neighborhood with free WiFi Internet. The antenna and WiFi gear was removed from Kensington and installed on the rooftop of
Linuxcaffe (named after the
Linux Operating system) on the corner of Harbord St. and Grace St. in downtown Toronto in June 2008.
WN used
Free and open source software exclusively for its
servers,
Web site, and
wireless routers. The servers ran
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the ...
, and the
Linksys WRT54GL routers at each location ran
OpenWrt,
ChilliSpot, and
OpenVPN. Wi-Fi
mesh networking
A mesh network is a local area network topology in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate wit ...
using
OLSR was also part of WN's deployment, with several small mesh networks in use in Toronto.
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WN's servers were hosted by the
Toronto Community Co-location Project in downtown Toronto from January, 2005 until May 2008.
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Colan Schwartz wrote the billing system, Ron Goulard installed antennas and configured equipment, and
Jorge Torres-Solis wrote custom
firmware
In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide h ...
for the routers.
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Wireless Nomad was a Community Partner with the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) and the Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project (CWIRP) through Prof.
Andrew Clement
Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is frequently shortened to "Andy" or "Drew". The word is derive ...
and
Matthew A. Wong (graduate student) with the
University of Toronto Faculty of Information
The Faculty of Information (or the iSchool at the University of Toronto) is an undergraduate and graduate school that offers the following programs: a Bachelor of Information (BI), a Master of Information (MI), a Master of Museum Studies (MMSt), a ...
(formerly Faculty of Information Studies).
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In 2008, the co-op filed a submission to the CRTC in support of the
Canadian Association of Internet Providers
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
in the
Bell throttling issue.
[
{{cite web
, url=http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2865/196/
, title=Wireless Nomad Supports CAIP at the CRTC
, access-date=2012-04-22
]
References
External links
Wireless Nomad BlogJorge Torres-Solis. Personal page : Curriculum VitaeWireless Nomad on Ohloh
Media cooperatives in Canada
Internet service providers of Canada
Companies based in Toronto