My start into community wireless networks

Having read the blog post of my friend Mihi on how he started at FunkFeuer I felt inspired to reflect my own involvement with the project. It’s been about 5 years now that I started in the back then rather small community network of FunkFeuer with around 10 nodes.

However the story on how I got there starts a few years earlier. I myself growing up in the countryside of Austria was very fond of the idea to experiment with anything network related and also undertook several attempts to wire up my neighborhood friends, whom I could only convince to do so in order to play CounterStrike together in times where no DSL or other high speed internet was anywhere on the horizon for this village. We pulled coax cable through the attic of our apartment building and ate a lot of dust. But in the end we had a 10Base-2 network which connected about 5 computers. All this was far from a community network as one would describe it today and neither did we have the intent to build one.

A bit later I remember stumbling upon an article describing a network using Wave LAN technology in suburban Sydney to connect up the neighborhood. Back then it didn’t strike me how much alike our attempts actually were. I then also tried to start a wireless network in a small town close to where I lived when the whole community network initiatives got traction. Back then however setting up such network was way to techy and it was therefor hard to convince even the young crowd to join in.

Shortly after I moved to Vienna I started to look for community wireless networks. There were a few strange webpages mentioning another initiative that I could not really get hold of. Then some day I found FunkFeuer which back then only offered a Wiki which vaguely described what it was about and that there was a meeting every Monday in a location called VIVI in the center of Vienna. I quickly checked if there would be a meeting the next Monday and got that confirmed from my now dear friend Andreas. Arriving at a stormy winter day somewhere in January 2005 at the “Montagstreffen” I met Aaron and Mihi. Mihi held an inspirational speech about OLSR and I was at first a bit turned down by no real structure after which I could get started in all of this (I guess it’s an Austrian thing ). However when I got home I started reading up on the various topics discussed in this 2 hour session and quickly started to like the idea more and more.

Fast forward 5 years and I have spent countless hours around FunkFeuer. We have spent nights in basements trying to get fibre links up and running and there was lots of frustration but I dearly believe that FunkFeuer in Vienna has reached a critical mass by now that the project is self sustaining and will take more and more shape as we move along. Personally I still like to keep a few tasks around the backbone close to my heart but have let go on lots of things others have picked up and probably done a better job than I ever could. At the same time it is interesting to see that some things do not change in a voluntary project like FunkFeuer. Our homepage as on my first day is still a kind of mess but nonetheless it seems that we attract people and I am very proud having and being part of this. What united us back then and what keeps impressing me about FunkFeuer is the drive to build something on our own.