The Change Mariner

Free Wi-Fi Blankets San Francisco

TechTV:

A project to help bring free Wi-Fi to the masses is picking up steam in the San Francisco Bay area. If it succeeds, it could become a model for other similar networks all over the world. On "Tech Live," see how the project to broadcast an Internet signal to a city could change Wi-Fi and the way we log on forever.

Some think wireless Internet should be for sharing, and Tim Pozar is a socially minded techie who's using his Wi-Fi know-how to do just that. But he's not sharing just with his neighborhood, but with dozens of neighborhoods. The whole project is perfectly legal and within FCC limits, and in most cases only costs a few hundred bucks to build.

"What we're doing is lighting up a number of blocks," he says of the Wi-Fi signal while rifling through some boxes of tech junk. "What I'm doing is what we call a neighborhood area network, or NAN."