Building Wireless Community Networks Review

Building Wireless Community Networks
by Rob Flickenger
O'Reilly & Associates, 2002
ISBN 0596002041
Table of contents

It doesn't take a village to raise a network: it takes a heterogeneous group of individuals with aims that are close to similar enough to work cooperatively for a greater goal. In that process, not only are new communities of thought and work founded, but the method of getting to the goal may evolve new ends, new friends, new kinds of community. And you may learn something, too.

The theme of Rob Flickenger's Building Wireless Community Networks is clearly on the building part: building wireless, building communities, and building networks. It's an easy call to say that this book contains somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands of dollars worth of advice on each of those constructive topics.

Before I critique the book, though, let me digress on community. I'm a loose member of the wireless community. As a journalist, I'm working hard to objectively analyze the companies, movements, and governmental bodies that interact in this space. But I can't deny making friends and having folks I think of as close colleagues. I've never met Rob Flickenger, but I have exchanged email with him. I write for O'Reilly Networks Wireless DevCenter; so does Rob. I know, in fact, that he will read this review (hi, Rob!). So when I'm blunt about this book, you know that I'm aware of the community I'm part of and writing for.

Now the meat. The book covers all the important aspects of setting up community networks for cheap using off-the-shelf parts (literally: Pringles's cans are used as part of inexpensive antenna assmblies) and, as applicable, Linux and similar configurations.

But I kept finding myself drawn up short: I'd get into a chapter describing how, for instance, to build the Pringles antenna, which described a parts list, and had an illustration showing an assembled antenna. Rob explains how to cut and put it together until he gets to the part about soldering wire to a connector. "Straighten the heavy copper wire and solder it to the connector. When inside the can, the wire should be just below the midpoint of the can..." There's no picture of this, and I can't figure out from context quite where the wire goes: bent, up, down, straight out?

Later in the chapter he writes, "Most likely, failing to take into account the thickness of the washers has made the entire front element a little too long." Shouldn't this have been revised, tested, and included? Rob instead points us to the current state of the can at NoCat.

Where the book falls down, possibly, is it's combination of a breezy, anecdotal tone coupled with super-technical detail, and I'm a pretty technical guy these days. There's not much middle ground, which is where you would probably find many of the people most interested in building these sorts of networks and lacking the first-hand knowledge to get started. The book will ultimately get them there, after a steep learning curve, especially coupled with the copious resources on the Web pointed to.

The book's looseness coupled with the number of Web references does provoke a question: why a book and why not a Web site? The answer is clear: the time is right for a manual of the revolution that can be read, thumbed through, annotated, passed around, and recommended. A Web site, strangely, is more static than a book in that regard: this book is the Palm Pilot of community networks, providing a window into that larger resource base.

It's true that I was hoping for a tighter, more how-to approach to building and configuring community networks instead of a quick overview with some more detailed areas. Tighter prose with fewer asides and more in-between illustrations would have added clarity and reduced the number of questions I have after reading it. Many subjects are breezed over that could have had entire chapters devoted to them. For instance, I would have liked an entire chapter on security which could have included the configuration for end-to-end SSH tunneled links. Or how to set up rules in ipchains or using ZoneAlarm or Windows security software to route between interfaces.

As a first edition that both offers hard-won advice coupled with an interesting history of the nascence of community networking, the book shines. I'll expect a pretty quick turnaround from O'Reilly & Associates, however, with the changes in the field, and the information Rob is gathering to get a thicker, richer second edition that's more nitty-gritty.