Anthony Townsend, who teaches urban planning at New York University, is intrigued by the possibility that wireless local area networks could help create meaningful communities in the hearts of dense, often impersonal, metropolitan environments.

He's so intrigued, in fact, he's on a mission of sorts: to launch a variety of pilot projects that will advance the use of wireless LANs as "civic networks" in New York City. The way he sees it, cities are replete with organizations that have the wherewithal to supply wireless LANs so local residents can enjoy free Internet access in their favorite parks, train stations and other public gathering places.

The concept is fairly simple: partner with an organization willing to provide the equipment and bandwidth, use volunteers to install the equipment and spread the word that the network is available.

Townsend, a research scientist at the Taub Urban Research Center in the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU, is working to establish such civic WLANs in New York City under the auspices of NYCWireless, a wireless community networking organization he co-founded last year.

The organization is one of a handful of volunteer-run groups cropping up around the country to share bandwidth and spread the word about wireless Ethernet. But just as no two cities are alike, these new wireless community networking organizations are turning out to be distinct entities, each reflecting the interests of their members and the business and social dynamics of their local environment.

Some groups are strictly educational. Some are utopian and want to share all the bandwidth an 802.11b network can provide. Others blatantly want to subvert their local phone companies and Internet service providers. Townsend says NYCWireless is distinct from all of these.

The focus of NYCWireless, he says, is to get businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations that have jurisdiction over public places or real estate to sponsor–i.e., pay for–WLAN networks at their particular locations or properties. The rationale for sponsorship centers on the idea that providing Internet access enhances the social appeal of public places as well as the commercial value of private property that is used by the public.

"We're very heavily geared toward digesting this whole technology and its use for mass consumption, as opposed to being a hobbyist activity," he says.

While NYCWireless to date has set up somewhat informal WLANs in Washington Square Park and Tompkins Square Park by finding system owners willing to share their networks, the group is well on its way to introducing its civic networking model. Next month, the organization will activate its first project reflecting that approach, an 802.11b network designed to provide free wireless Internet services in Bryant Park, a large showcase urban park in midtown Manhattan that is heavily used by office workers during the lunch hour.

"This will demonstrate how you can add wireless Internet to a public space," Townsend says. "It's an amenity, like water, air or heat."

The way NYCWireless approached this project reflects the group's philosophy and the way it functions. NYCWireless volunteers contacted Bryant Park Restoration Corp., a nonprofit corporation that runs the park, and asked it to sponsor the network. The nonprofit agreed and put up the needed funding–$10,000 for the equipment and $10,000 for the first year's bandwidth. NYCWireless members have volunteered to set up the network.

While the group's strategy reflects its views on the nature of community and the value of connectivity in their city, the phenomenon of community networks that provide free services to users is one of the surprising outgrowths of the popular IEEE 802.11b standard.

The standard initially was conceived to facilitate WLANs for businesses. But it rapidly gained momentum in consumer markets once interoperable products driven by the Wireless Ethernet Communications Association and decreasing product costs made the magic of radio-transmitted Internet services affordable for just about anyone.

Community networks, which are sprouting up around the country in a grassroots movement, are one of the most creative and interesting phenomena to emerge with the popularization of the technology. "It's a new citizens' band," says Tim Pozar, co-founder of the Bay Area Wireless Users Group, which is considered the first organization to promote community 802.11b networking.

Pozar says the earliest community-style wireless Ethernet was deployed in Aspen, Colo., in the late 1990s as part of a pet project of Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s co-founder and chief scientist. Joy's team provided wireless connectivity throughout the town using wireless local area networking equipment from Aironet Wireless Communications, which was bought by Cisco Systems Inc. in 1999.

But those were the days before affordable Wi-Fi-branded interoperable products were on the market. So while the Aspen system excited the imaginations of computer networking enthusiasts, it was largely an isolated case.

The grassroots movement that is under way today got its start out in the middle of nowhere at the 2000 Burning Man counterculture festival held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. That year, Matt Peterson, Pozar's co-founder at BAWUG, and others set up a few commercially available wireless access points and activated PlayaNet, a free network for festival attendees. They made the network available to anyone who brought a laptop and PC card. The team also set up kiosks equipped with wirelessly networked computers for use by anyone wanting to send or receive information from others attending the festival. The network did not provide Internet connectivity, however.

But PlayaNet did start something because when Peterson got back to San Francisco, the word was out. Burning Man attendees and others e-mailed him wanting to know how to set up networks, too. He and Pozar started BAWUG to provide an educational resource and informal user group for those interested in community wireless networks. The phenomenon took off from there, fueled this time by affordable technology and a growing supply of Wi-Fi-branded interoperable products on the market.

Today, of course, community networks are up or launching in many of America's cities, from Boston to Seattle and dozens of places in between. Each has its own identity. For example, SeattleWireless, one of the first to launch, is deploying access points as part of a large project that aims to create a wireless backbone in the city.

One of the newer ones is being established in Sebastopol, Calif., where local residents have set up a handful of network nodes around town. This network, called NoCat, functions under the premise that an individual who establishes a node covers equipment costs and digital subscriber line connection fees and simply shares bandwidth with people within range.

Sebastopol, a rural community of fewer than 10,000 residents, may not have the urban character that Seattle and New York City have, but the network is bound to get attention because NoCat is going up under the leadership of Rob Flickenger, Internet systems administrator at O'Reilly and Associates. Flickenger also has authored the book "Building Wireless Community Networks," published by O'Reilly.

Flickenger named the Sebastopol network NoCat in reference to a comment Albert Einstein once used to explain how a radio works: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: You send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

While community network advocates' opinions and observations are diverse, those involved in the movement believe the wireless industry itself will have much to learn from this phenomenon.

Townsend says despite the technology's popularity, it isn't ready for prime time yet. "There's still a lot of education and streamlining as far as ease of use that needs to be done," he says. "We're trying to develop our own solutions to those problems."

His larger concern is that the industry and those creating wireless Internet solutions may not see wireless networking from his urban-planning perspective. As he explains it, the wired Internet eliminated geographic differences between people and communities; the wireless Internet will rise up out of those differences. It's a fundamental difference that, he says, will drive the community networking phenomenon.

"The way this gets built and used is going to be much more dependent on local communities and places than the wired Internet," he insists.

The emergence of the community networking phenomenon may well be evidence that he's right.