MIT Roofnet

A few weeks ago, MIT graduate student Shan Sinha cancelled his broadband Internet service. Now his Net connection comes through the chimney. From a computer in the living room of his Cambridge apartment, a few blocks from the MIT campus, a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna. From there, data packets hop to another roof-mounted antenna at a nearby student’s apartment. That way, from roof to roof in multiple hops, Sinha’s data packets finally reach a gateway — a computer connected to the fixed Internet — at MIT’s computer science building