Specifically, Ethernet's rise set the stage for the present rooftop dramas. When Ethernet gained enough of a critical mass about two years ago to become the de facto standard for all local area networks, the prospects for the wireless world changed drastically. Businesses and colleges started to consider campus-wide wireless networks at the same time as wireless modems began appearing on the market. Then, in the summer of 1999, Apple started bundling an AirPort wireless antenna into a handful of its laptops and the G4 desktop. This decision to bundle, hackers say, changed everything. It legitimized wireless connectivity and made mainstream consumers aware for the first time that their laptops need not necessarily be tethered.

It also gave hackers easy access to an otherwise hard-to-find piece of technology that they needed: the antenna connector. To date, the antenna connector remains the key ingredient to any successful wireless network, says Bob Keyes, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who was one of the four founders who launched Guerrilla.net. It is the link between a home computer and the cable that runs to a roof antenna -- the glue that holds the network together. The 2.4 gigahertz antennas -- tree-and-branch wonders that resemble TV antennas but are small enough to fit in a backpack -- don't come with these little doohickeys, which meant that wireless-obsessed geeks had to dig them up at ham radio boutiques or commercial wireless providers.

Now they just have to dig them out of an Apple computer. This is a significant change. Whereas the old connectors were expensive, hard to find and difficult to make work with a computer as opposed to, say, a television, the new Apple connectors require far less hassle. "We usually just get the computers from friends, open them up and just pull out the antenna and the connector," Keyes says. Tape it to a cable, solder that to a rooftop antenna (through a more generic connector called an SMA) and the network is up and running. Simply tweak the network configurations on a Palm VII or another Web-enabled device like a laptop with a wireless modem and your home-based files are accessible -- via air, which as Keyes notes "is very cool."

The total cost: about $800, a third of what it would have run a few years ago.

The Net is also available through these networks, in conjunction with an established ISP. Free-software model or not, wireless Ethernet enthusiasts may be building their own alternative infrastructure, but they are not aiming to completely reinvent the Net. Westervelt, for example, says that Seattle Wireless wants to "coexist with ISPs." He envisions being able to use the home-built network when he's in town, a hard-wired connection when he's at home and a traditional cellular uplink when he's traveling. "We're not trying to put ISPs out of business," he says. "We need them."

Still, Jupiter Research broadband analyst Dylan Brooks sees wireless Ethernet activity as a wake-up call, a creative protest against today's telecom status quo, and the more militant participants agree. They talk not just of fun and AirPorts but also of present-day problems that they'd like to see fixed -- like the nagging irritation that cellphones don't work in some conference centers or the widespread dissatisfaction that it takes some consumers months to get DSL installation.

Just give them the chance, they argue, and they could fix all these bugs by applying their open-source development model. Everything that these groups do is open to the public. It's a teach-and-be-taught ideal that mimics how free software is created, but runs completely counter to the telecom business model.

"The Internet grew because millions of companies added infrastructure to the Net," Kahle says, yet "the telco model is that a single company adds all the infrastructure." This is the reason that you can't get faster data service on your cellphone or connect easily in an office building. It's not that these tasks are technologically impossible; it's just that "the monopoly system gets good enough and then the incumbent plays defense," Kahle says. In contrast, an open approach "allows hot spots to be improved organically."

Choice is what matters most to these wireless gurus. The goal is to give users power over their own forms of communication, says Keyes of Guerrilla.net. "The free-software movement made it so you could control your computer," he says. "This movement -- the free-network movement -- gives you control over infrastructure. It gives you a choice of how you want to connect." And maybe someday, adds Westervelt, these networks will even be used as the model "so that if you live in a developing country and you want a network, you'll be able to build it yourself," he says. "All the information will be there."

Of course, for now, these hopes are nothing but sci-fi fantasies. None of these initiatives has more than 30 antennas up and running, not nearly enough to cover their metropolitan areas.

But people like Westervelt remain upbeat. Wireless notebook-size Web-pads using Ethernet connections will appear next year, and if the Federal Communications Commission allocated a specific part of the spectrum for nonprofit telecoms, the movement could take off. Plus, they argue, there are other, more subtle benefits. Setting up the network isn't just "cool" because of what it can offer in the virtual world, says Westervelt. Indeed, a large part of the fun derives from the fact that it's a healthy alternative to cyberspace's lack of a material reality. It's physical, a hands-on, "MacGyver"-like attempt to create giant brains, and thus, it's a lot of fun.

"We sit behind screens all day," he says. "Getting up on a roof and sticking an antenna on is so great because it's a change. We're not just tinkering anymore, we're meeting new friends and getting some air."

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