He has already mustered 20 individuals and hopes to have 40 members by the end of the month. There are a lot of business and personal reasons, said Mostovoy, for establishing an active community network.

"From a personal point of view, I like the idea of having a citywide network that you can use at no cost to play online games, make good quality VOIP and video phone calls, watch videos that don't have to be the size of a matchbox due to bandwidth restrictions and costs and a heap of other things that seem to add up in cost or end up in shaping when you try and do them over the Internet," he said.

"From a business point of view, I like the idea of being able to turn on my laptop anywhere in Canberra and be able to VPN to my file server or Exchange mail server at the office." Unlike many of the other wireless networking communities already established, Mostovoy wants Ozwireless to remain as technology-neutral as possible.

"One of the things I didn't like when looking at some of the other wireless communities out there was how heavily they seem to be aligned with Linux and everything is built around for that platform," he said. "But I've been working with Microsoft most of my career and that is really my comfort zone. So one of the things I'll be pushing with the others is to try and stay as technology-neutral as possible.

That is, support everyone to the same level regardless if they are running Windows, Linux or MAC OS on their computer." The technology to be used for the core network is yet to be decided. "We will definitely be using some sort of 802.11 setup (most likely 802.11g). Other than that, I'm not sure what we'll use yet - there seem to be a few models out there.