You are in one of the most unpleasant places in America: Nevada's Black Rock Desert.
The sun cuts through your sunscreen like butter, 60-mph winds rip out your tent pegs and the night freezes your sleeping bag like a popsicle. You are 15 miles from a telephone, 80 miles from a police station and 150 miles from a hospital.
You are in the middle of nowhere.
As you huddle over your camp stove, wishing the rain would stop, you stare at your laptop and ask: "Which 802.11 network do I feel like logging on to?"
Welcome to Black Rock City, site of the Burning Man Festival, an experiment in free expression, temporary community and grassroots technology. Burning Man's 25,000 participants are a unique mix of Deadheads meet dot-coms: The former provide a sense of community and "be-in" fervor; the latter bring technolust and operative know-how. Thanks to the mix, improvised technology has risen to the level of high art during the festival's 15-year history.
Two teams established wireless networks at Burning Man during this past Labor Day weekend, each offering a glimmer of the future of high-frequency wireless networking. IEEE 802.11 is the wireless Ethernet protocol that makes it all possible. PCMCIA cards, personal digital assistants, laptops and desktops can use it to connect to an Ethernet backbone at speeds as high as 11 megabits per second. Drop a US$100 to US$150 wireless local area network (LAN) card in your notebook, and you're surfing at high speeds.
No speed limits
First used in the early 1980s as a technology to track warehouse items, 802.11 promises a high-speed Shangri-La of total interoperability without wired hassles such as cables and certification protocols. IEEE 802.11 - and its souped-up cousin, 802.11b - are hot for a simple reason: speed. The technology can reach dramatically high rates of speed that make enriched Web and network experiences such as streaming audio and video possible.
The two teams that put the 802.11 hype to the test during this year's festival were Internet Burning Man and PlayaNet. Both projects wanted to demonstrate how communications technology can support a temporary community. One project connected Black Rock City with the outside world; the other established internal communication in a makeshift environment utterly lacking the societal infrastructure that most take for granted.
"I was up 40 hours straight setting up the network," says Cliff Cox, a member of the Internet Burning Man team. Drawing on his experience as an 802.11 technician and on previous experiments at the Oregon County Fair, Cox and team members used a Tachyon mobile satellite to establish a 2-Mbps uplink - connectivity available to any participant with appropriate equipment. Why would anyone stay up two days building a temporary network in the middle of the desert? "I think [wireless networking] genuinely has the potential to increase quality of life, and Burning Man provides an excellent environment to implement it," Cox says. "We were very happy with the result."
Describing the event as "digital neopaganism," Cox believes the demographics of the festival explain why tech and tie-dye are able to coexist peacefully at Burning Man. "Most of the participants are from the [San Francisco] Bay area. They tend to be more self-reliant and adventurous about these sort of things. There's also a lot of technical experience to draw on."
This year, there was only one "competitive provider" at the event, PlayaNet, which established an 802.11 intranet without an uplink. PlayaNet organiser Matt Peterson explains why the festival needs its own LAN: "One of the members of our team witnessed a car accident [on the way to the festival] a few years back. In the aftermath, somebody was trying to find their son, which can be very difficult out there. Being computer people, we saw a communications need."
Mars bound?
Festival organisers and volunteers remain of mixed opinion about the impact of such technological advances. "Part of the reason folks come out to the desert is to disconnect," says Jim Graham, Burning Man's media spokesman. "If Internet connectivity becomes pervasive, we'll probably have to look at moving the event to another planet. The Internet isn't inherently evil. We just want to challenge artists to do something creative with it."
The Ossicle Project, for example, built a giant ear onto an old Subaru and cruised around streaming live audio out to the Web. Another group streamed live video from a panoramic camera mounted above the centre of Black Rock City, and reporters from around the world were able to file stories and photos direct from the event.
Duane Buddrius at BreezeCom says wireless LANs such as those established by Internet Burning Man and PlayaNet are actually "relatively easy" to set up. IEEE 802.11 is ideal for establishing communications infrastructure quickly, and BreezeCom has sold high-speed wireless equipment to developing countries where the infrastructure is weak or unreliable. The technology has also been used where disasters such as earthquakes or fire disrupt primary communications.
You won't have to visit the desert to get your own taste of the technology. Wireless companies such as Intermec Technologies foresee high-speed wireless connections at hotels and airports in the next two to three years.
Business travelers won't have to mess with dial-up networking at pay phones using acoustic couplers, cabling and a paltry 56-kilobit-per-second modem: High-speed wireless networking providers plan to be in some airport lounges, allowing travelers to surf at speeds 20 times faster than analog modems provide.
