Bridging wired networks with two Linksys WAP11s for under $400: my piece for O'Reilly Networks's Wireless DevCenter on the nitty-gritty of using the bridging software that come with these sub-$200 devices to link wired Ethernets.
Parasitic grid or free wireless networking?: the author of this piece pushes a term for free wireless networking I haven't heard from anyone ever: parasitic grid. Read responses of the folks on the Bay Area Wireless User Group's (BAWUG) mailing list to this term: [1], [2], and [3].
The term parasitic grid or parasitic network appears to originate from a single British Telecomm (BT) researcher named Peter Cochrane. He wrote two interesting papers with great foresight: one from 1999 on the general idea, and another with more contemporary references in 2000.
The notion of parasite here is really more of opportunism: rather than have to configure devices, we simply walk around and they plug in wherever and whenever they can. This is kind of the idea behind 3G cellular, in which ubiquitous relatively decent bandwidth is available whether travelling in a car at 65 mph, walking down a street, or in an office.
As I've commented in this space before, however, most of the time, people are in dense areas that can easily be served by current and soon-to-be-released flavors of 802.11.
My initial take was that the author of the InfoWorld piece linked above was trying to coin a phrase through introduction. After some email back and forth with him, I'm more convinced he doesn't view the phrase as a negative. I had seen it originally as pejorative term. (One of Schwartz's source emailed me to say that Schwartz had tried the phrase out on him, but he didn't agree with it as a good description of free wireless networking.)
But if you look at it as a purely technical description, parasitic's not half wrong. I'd definitely push opportunistic or vernacular networks instead, which eliminate most or all of the negative valence, while still painting the picture. The idea of walking around with devices that connect whenever and wherever they can is a powerful one, even more powerful than ubiquitous computing, which requires even more commercial infrastructure.
Thanks to Lawrence Lee (of Tomalak's Realm) for the original story link and the links to the BT researcher.