The telecommunication infrastructure of Singapore spans the entire city-state. Its development level is high, with close accessibility to the infrastructure from nearly all inhabited parts of the island and for all of the population, with exceptions. Today, the country is considered an international telecommunications hub, an achievement that was driven by Singapore's view that high-quality telecommunications is one of the critical factors that support its economic growth.
Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects are organizations that take a grassroots approach to providing a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.
The Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) is a grassroots wireless community network that was started 2002 in Athens, Greece. It takes advantage of new wireless technologies to connect people and services. In August 2010 the network comprised 1,120 backbone nodes and more than 2,900 client computers connect to it. There is also an association-club named awmn.
A mesh network is a local network topology in which the infrastructure nodes connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data from/to clients. This lack of dependency on one node allows for every node to participate in the relay of information. Mesh networks dynamically self-organize and self-configure, which can reduce installation overhead. The ability to self-configure enables dynamic distribution of workloads, particularly in the event a few nodes should fail. This in turn contributes to fault-tolerance and reduced maintenance costs.
A hotspot is a physical location where people may obtain Internet access, typically using Wi-Fi technology, via a wireless local-area network (WLAN) using a router connected to an Internet service provider.
Freifunk is a non-commercial open grassroots initiative to support free computer networks in the German region. Freifunk is part of the international movement for a wireless community network. The initiative counts about 400 local communities with over 41,000 access points. Among them, Münster, Aachen, Munich, Stuttgart, and Paderborn are the biggest communities, with more than 1,000 access points each.
Netsukuku is an experimental peer-to-peer routing system, developed by the FreakNet MediaLab in 2005, created to build up a distributed network, anonymous and censorship-free, fully independent but not necessarily separated from the Internet, without the support of any server, ISP and no central authority.
Île Sans Fil is a non-profit community wireless network that provides free public wireless Internet access to mobile users in public spaces throughout the island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The organization works with cafés, restaurants, bars, stores, community organizations, and individuals to provide free Internet access in public spaces. As of April 2010, the network had over 140,000 registered users and over 212 live hotspots. In 2016, the organization changed it operating name to Zone Access Public Montréal
Roofnet was an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Research included link-level measurements of 802.11, finding high-throughput routes in the face of lossy links, link adaptation, and developing new protocols which take advantage of radio’s unique properties (ExOR). The software developed for this project is available free as open source.
A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) or mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points in managed (infrastructure) wireless networks. Instead, each node participates in routing by forwarding data for other nodes, so the determination of which nodes forward data is made dynamically on the basis of network connectivity and the routing algorithm in use.
The Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) is a routing protocol for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks which is under development by the German "Freifunk" community and intended to replace the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR).
San Francisco Municipal Wireless was a canceled municipal wireless network that would have provided internet access to the city of San Francisco, California.
Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) is a "map-and-encapsulate" protocol which is developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force LISP Working Group. The basic idea behind the separation is that the Internet architecture combines two functions, routing locators and identifiers in one number space: the IP address. LISP supports the separation of the IPv4 and IPv6 address space following a network-based map-and-encapsulate scheme. In LISP, both identifiers and locators can be IP addresses or arbitrary elements like a set of GPS coordinates or a MAC address.
Comunes is a nonprofit organization aiming to encourage the commons and facilitating grassroots work through free software web tools. Previously known as Ourproject.org, this collective established itself as a legal entity in 2009, forming Comunes. Nowadays it serves as an umbrella organization for several projects related to the Commons.
Guifi.net is a free, open and neutral, mostly wireless community network, with over 35,000 active nodes and about 63,000 km of wireless links. The majority of these nodes are located in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, in Spain, but the network is growing in other parts of the world. The network is self-organized and operated by the users using unlicensed wireless links and open optical fiber links.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
Wirelesspt is a non-commercial open grassroots initiative to support free computer networks that is not dependent of central infrastructure, corporation or entity which is done by the ordinary citizen provide free, open and democratic access to the highways of information technologies helping people and organizations implementing wireless networks that will benefit their communities.
NYC Mesh is a physical network of interconnected routers and a group of enthusiasts working to support the expansion of the project as a freely accessible, open, wireless community network. NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider (ISP), although it does connect to the internet and offer internet access as a service to members. The network includes over 600 active member nodes throughout the five boroughs of New York City, with concentrations of users in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
