San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of nine other groups launched the Open Wireless Movement today – a new project to promote a landscape of shared, wireless Internet.

"We envision a world where sharing one's Internet connection is the norm," said EFF Activist Adi Kamdar. "A world of open wireless would encourage privacy, promote innovation, and benefit the public good, giving us network access whenever we need it. And everyone – users, businesses, developers, and Internet service providers – can get involved to help make it happen."

The Open Wireless Movement site at openwireless.org gives users of all kinds technological and legal information around opening up a wireless network, including how-to guides and responses to common myths. The site includes specialized information for households, small businesses, developers, and Internet Service Providers. The Open Wireless Movement coalition is also working to develop router technology making it easier for people open their networks without losing quality of Internet access or compromising security.

"The frustrating thing about wireless networks today is that they're everywhere – there can be dozens of them bouncing around you at any given instant – but you're locked out of almost all of them," said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. "We realized that the Internet would work much better, and many amazing new kinds of devices would be possible, if just a small fraction of them could be opened. So we started a movement to make that happen"

The Open Wireless Coalition consists of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Internet Archive, NYCwireless, the Open Garden Foundation, OpenITP, the Open Spectrum Alliance, the Open Technology Institute, and the Personal Telco Project.

For more on the Open Wireless Movement:

https://www.openwireless.org

Contacts:

Peter Eckersley

Technology Projects Director

Electronic Frontier Foundation

pde@eff.org

Adi Kamdar

Activist

Electronic Frontier Foundation

adi@eff.org