By using local sources for materials and fabricating parts yourself, you can build reliable network links with very little budget. And by working with your local community, you can build a telecommunications infrastructure that benefits everyone who participates in it. This book is not a guide to configuring wireless for your laptop or choosing consumer grade gear for your home network. The emphasis is on building infrastructure links intended to be used as the backbone for wide area wireless networks as well as solving the last mile problem.
With those goals in mind, information is presented from many points of view, including technical, social, and financial factors. The extensive collection of case studies included present various groups' attempts at building these networks, the resources that were committed to them, and the ultimate results of these attempts.
It is also important to note that all of the resources, techniques and design methodologies described in this book are valid in any part of the world. There are many rural parts all over the globe that remain unconnected to the Internet for reasons of cost, geography, politics and so on. Deploying wireless networking can often lead to these problems being solved thereby extending connectivity to those who as yet have not achieved it. There are many community based networking projects emerging everywhere. So whether you live in the United Kingdom, Kenya, Chile or India or anywhere else, this book can be a useful practical guide.
Since the first spark gap experiments at the turn of the XIX century, wireless has been a rapidly evolving area of communications technology. While we provide specific examples of how to build working high speed data links, the techniques described in this book are not intended to replace existing wired infrastructure (such as telephone systems or fibre optic backbone).
Rather, these techniques are intended to augment existing systems, and provide connectivity in areas where running fibre or other physical cable would be impractical.
We hope you find this book useful for solving your communication challenges.
