HIGHGATE, north London, a short walk from Karl Marx’s grave. Here, in a hilltop apartment, self-employed programmer Jon Anderson is plotting a modern revolution. While big corporations fight to squeeze cash from punters who seem reluctant to pay for wireless internet access, Anderson wants to give the internet back to the people. His ambition: to provide dirt-cheap, wireless broadband internet access, wherever people need it. It’s an idea whose revolutionary potential would have made Marx proud.
Anderson’s plan involves two existing technologies. The first is a much-discussed but problematical idea known as mesh networking. This is a technique for creating self-organising clusters of computers that make…
