The Ubiquity of WiFi

[BenBurch]

I recently installed a network sniffer application onto my iPod Touch. Right here I can get only two networks, mine and my neighbors.

Today I was a passenger on a trip out into rural northern Illinois to see my doctor who works part of the week out there and had the chance to see how many networks I encountered.

Well, I was amazed. There were stretches though fields with only a farmhouse in sight where it was indicating four or five networks, some of them open.

I'd expect that sort of thing at Clark and Addison in Chicago, but not out in farm country.

Now here is my question; Is it possible to use a WiFi network to route to other networks without having to install a second WiFi transceiver? If so you could span the country with a WiFi freenet.

[Broes]

Technicaly you could setup a wifi which would use a other wireless connection as input.

However, a standard rule of thumb in the networking world is to keep the ammount of hopping to a minimum (a hop here being going from 1 router to another). 30 hops in general is already a huge distance (networkwise).
Wireless routers normaly have only a short range and are prone to bad connections. Given the range of lets say 1 mile (I know, already hugely overrated), you might be able to span a radius of 30 miles theoreticaly with a very large ammount of bad connections.

[BenBurch]

Amateur packet radio would seem to have similar deficits and is still widely used.

And back in the Fido-net/Usenet days we had the concept of a store-and-forward transport to deal with intermittent connections, so perhaps some means of locally buffering and forwarding could be devised?

(And I have uucp built and running on this iMac, so the software is still in usable shape.)