The doubters about WiFi’s ultimate potential often talk about the lack of ubiquitous WAPs (wireless access points) to justify their skepticism. One of the reasons for my optimism to the contrary is "mesh" networking technology. The idea is that people or organizations put WAPs on their roofs. At least one of the WAPs has a high speed Internet connection and the rest of them share the bandwidth.
A group of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is actually doing this — the experiment is called Roofnet. The concept of WiFi mesh networking has been around for years but the project in Cambridge, Massachusetts may be the most sophisticated implementation to date. The MIT Lab is giving away Netgear routers that are loaded with special software that allows wireless signals to be propagated from WAP to WAP. More importantly, the Lab is making the software available free of charge to anyone who wants it. The result may be more and more municipalities and emerging countries being able to offer access to their citizens. In particular, the One Laptop Per Child program could get a boost from the Roofnet approach. Many of us complain about slow network speed but if you are in a country that has no bandwidth for the majority of the people, being able to share a small amount of bandwidth from a nearby roof-top (or tree) could be a fantastic development.