CC image from sarnil on flickr

In this week’s City Paper, Lydia DePillis has a story about an ad-hoc wireless broadband internet network that emerged out of community discussions in DC’s Bloomingdale neighborhood.

Finally, the group gave up on city assistance, turning to a local IT company that could get them a commercial broadband subscription. They set up “gateway” routers at Big Bear and in Rustik Tavern and then started knocking on doors to ask whether homeowners wouldn’t mind hosting a free “repeater.” For a few hundred dollars in hardware and about $800 a year for broadband, a six-block long stretch of houses now has WiFi access—for much less than the cost of individually subscribing each area household to Verizon or Comcast.

For Youngblood, wiring the neighborhood is worth it because of what he can then build on top: Through his company, Youngblood Capital Group, he hopes to develop a “smart grid” in the area that could support things like solar energy systems. “You build the network, and then you’ve got this fertile field you can grow everything in,” he says.

The application on a neighborhood basis is interesting.  I can speak to plenty of anecdotal accounts of similar networks on a smaller, apartment building basis where neighbors will chip in for one internet connection and share it via a wireless router – or even less formal ones where dwellers simply ‘steal’ wireless from unencrypted networks within range.

Lydia’s follow-up blog post addresses some of the competitive concerns that the to-the-curb providers might have:

But community wireless projects in America haven’t taken off to the same extent as they have in Europe, in part because of pushback from the big carriers. (Although, as Youngblood pointed out, resistance is sort of silly: Expanding wireless to underserved areas is a good thing for cable companies, since some new users will inevitably want the stronger connection they can only get from “fiber to the curb.” In that way, free or low-cost wireless is like a gateway drug. “We get people addicted,” as he puts it. “If you want the strong stuff, go get it from the man.”)

The decentralization (and democratization) of these kinds of infrastructures is an intriguing prospect.