Brewster Kahle, Founder, SFLan

“Jumping out of bed in the morning is important to me,” Brewster Kahle said. “Otherwise, it's just a day job. You should do something to learn and grow during the eight hours when you're most alert.”

Kahle has wasted precious little time. After graduating from MIT, he founded the pioneering Internet publishing software company Wide Area Information Servers, later acquired by America Online. After a second start-up, Internet search engine software developer Alexa Online, was bought by Amazon.com, he founded the Internet Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and cataloging the Web's evolution via snapshots taken every six months. Kahle's latest project, SFLan, is a San Francisco-based wireless user group devoted to forging a community-owned broadband wireless network blanketing the entire Bay Area. “We want to make it so people can find DVD-quality video whenever and wherever they want,” Kahle said.

The cornerstone of the project is a series of boxlike rooftop nodes designed by SFLan member Cliff Cox. Each box includes an off-the-shelf 802.11 network card powered by a single-board computer and two high-gain antennas. According to Kahle, about 30 boxes are currently up and running, at a cost of about $1000 each.

“This is an experiment to see what would happen if you could own your own network node and your own network link,” Kahle said. “In the early 90s, we built all these ISPs, and now they've collapsed away. If we're going to go through the effort of making another wave of ISPs, how do we guarantee that they don't get killed off by the monopolists? The only thing I can think of is distributed ownership.”

Although the technology boasts the potential to solve last-mile problems in urban and rural areas at home and abroad, Kahle said a project of SFLan's scope and ambition could have started almost nowhere else. “San Francisco has a strong civic sense,” he said. “People love the city and the community.”