The MIT Tech reports on a plan in which MIT is collaborating with the city of Cambridge to deploy a free wireless mesh network. The article has some interesting technical details and says that the plan is based on MIT’s roofnet project, an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL.

A collaboration with MIT researchers may provide Cambridge with a free, city-wide, wireless internet service as early as late summer. The project will rely on a mesh networking technology that allows individual computers to become new access points, projecting the reach of the network beyond its original antennas.
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Traditionally, a wireless network is centralized around one wireless access point, which communicates with a wireless card in any laptop or desktop computer, Hart said. Mesh technology allows individual computers to propagate the network and act as new access points, making it unnecessary for a user to be within range of the original wireless signal, she said.
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[the wireless access points] are constructed from $15 commercial access points purchased from the software manufacturer NETGEAR, he said. The 40 milliwatt chip inside the commercial product is replaced with a 400 milliwatt chip and ‘hacked’ to include computer code that enables the mesh technology, he said.
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The code, which is publicly available, was written by an MIT research group called Roofnet. Daniel E. Aguayo G, a Roofnet researcher, said that though they were not the first to write a code for mesh technology, they were the first to conduct a large-scale test of their software. …

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