Deployment in Australia (Score 1)

Here in Australia, our federal government restricts the use of wireless (or indeed any) link technology such that providing network services to anyone not part of your own company/organisation requires you to become a licenced telecommunications provider (not a small undertaking).

A hurdle, but not insurmountable. I suspect that if enough Aussies got together and formed a public wireless network consortium (run as a business), paid membership fees, and with this income became a licenced telecommunications provider, we could do something.

And that something of course would be for every member to run a little 802.11 (or whatever, but we pick that 'cause it's standard!) base station and hopefully have enough people to provide decent coverage. And then you probably need some backbone links between base stations (and some very good routing engineers!)...

(I know this is being done on a limited scale in Canberra and other places, however I suspect these things are not 100% within the law and will get stomped on when it pops up on the radar screens of our bureaucrats.)

Of course, you need accounts and such to actually run the business, but hopefully not many.

Am I crazy? Anyone interested?