You want something for nothing. Don’t we all.

If you’re looking for internet access, more and more businesses these days are advertising free WiFi for their customers. And most developers are catching on and including WiFi as a basic amenity in their residential living complexes. But after a few hours of lingering on your laptop at a coffee shop you start to bounce and squirm like an over stimulated freak who’s ordered three too many soy lattes.

If Kory Mohr has his way, the whole city will become one big coffee shop… metaphorically speaking.

I met Mohr and his son Matt on Saturday morning at the Science Museum. He wanted to show me the first step on the yellow brick road of his dream—city wide, free wireless internet. We walked a few short blocks and knocked on the door of a typical Fan apartment. We were greeted by Justin, a pioneer, the first link of what Mohr hopes will be a Richmond-wide net of volunteers. On Justin’s second-story porch, we gathered around a small box with an antenna on top. Not much bigger than a cigarette pack, this box is what makes Mohr’s dream technologically feasible, a Meraki radio unit.

The Meraki broadcasts a wireless signal into the great democratic beyond for several blocks in every direction. The technology allows for gateways and nodes. A gateway is a computer with a high-speed internet connection attached to a radio unit. Its job is to exploit the host’s excess bandwith. A node captures the signal from a gateway unit and broadcasts it even further, like a wireless daisy chain. Volunteers who host a node needn’t have internet access. You can daisy chain together up to ten nodes until another gateway becomes necessary. Justin’s box is the first in Richmond to permit free wireless connectivity to the something-for-nothing-loving masses.

This effort is all volunteer, but Mohr has tried this before as a commercial enterprise. Six years ago he wrote a business plan, found investors and founded Frontier Broadband. He quickly discovered the limitations of the then current technology. In 2001, the broadband infrastructure was not as robust as it is today and it was expensive. After struggling for a few years, Mohr folded up his digital tents.

Enter Meraki, a company that formed around a group of MIT students and their PhD research project. Their goal was to create simple, affordable hardware capable of broadcasting an at large wireless signal. The result was the Meraki radio units—fifty bucks for an indoor unit, a hundred dollars for an outdoor one. A solar powered unit is in the works and, according to the company’s website (http://www.meraki.com), will be available soon.

Mohr quickly saw the potential of the Merakis; they were cheap and ridiculously easy to use. He programmed the basic architecture to string together a network of them. Two weeks ago, he put up his own site, Richmond Free Wireless (http://www.richmondfreewifi.org). Richmond blogs began to buzz with the news. Mohr is in negotiations with several businesses about hosting, but for now he’s keeping mum for fear of jinxing the deal. Exciting indeed, but he is hoping for and dependent on community involvement. Ultimately, the project will succeed one gateway and one node at a time.

Back on Justin’s porch, we gathered around the unassuming Meraki. Mohr stared at something off in the distance. Following his gaze, I turned around and there it was– the WTVR tower, over 1000 vertical feet of glorious potential. Mohr looked as if he had just found the object of his greatest desire.
“If only we could get a unit on top of that.”

Want to help? Go to http://www.richmondfreewifi.org