P2P Internet Sharing?

Given the nature of 802.11b/g, and also the regulatory regime in place in Australia, it is very difficult to supply a single high-bandwidth Internet feed to a community wireless network. Government regulations make the provision of such a feed basically impossible. Any organisation providing an Internet feed to a large, publicly accessable network is considered a "Carriage Service Provider" by the Government. This status burdens the organisation with various responsibilites, such as user accounting and provision of wiretaps. Even if the Government allowed it, the wireless links distributing the feed to the greater network would struggle to cope with the aggregation of bandwidth converging upon the Internet feed.

For both these reasons, grassroots distribution of Internet access seems a more feasable method. Mesh routing protocols such as OLSR make it easy for the average node-owner to share his or her Internet feed to the wider network. If a number of node-owners decided to share a small percentage of their private Internet bandwidth to the network, it is likely that a reasonable level of Internet access could be provided to the whole network.

Node-owners willing to share their Internet access would likely be spread across the network fairly evenly. OLSR automatically routes Internet-access requests to the nearest Internet feed with the best overall link quality. So there would be no central place on the network that would need to be serviced by expensive, high-capacity links.

Because each Internet gateway would be providing a small amount of Internet bandwidth to the network at no charge, taken individually each gateway would could not realistically be said to be a "Carriage Service Provider". Each individual gateway would be small enough to legally operate under the Government's regulatory radar.

Each individual Internet feed can afford to be unreliable - it is being provided at no cost to a grassroots network. It is the OLSR algorithm that ties these disparate feeds together to present a service that has a higher degree of reliablilty. No one individual or organisation would be responsible for the overall Internet service. The responsibility for security and user accounting is left to each Internet-sharing node-owner. So long as each node-owner knows the risks and responsibilities involved in sharing their Internet access, there should be no problem with node-owners making their own decision about sharing it or not.