Corinna "Elektra" Aichele

I'm basically a wireless and electronic geek. Before I began to use computers I loved to play with radio equipment and aerials. Then I discovered that computers with radio interfaces are even more fun. In 2003 I joined the Freifunk wireless community network initiative, which is striving to build free wireless communication networks maintained and owned by the users. Back then I suggested in an article which I posted on the Freifunk wiki to use the multipoint to multipoint (ad-hoc) capabilities of WiFi together with a mesh routing protocol to build inexpensive self-organizing mesh clouds. To my surprise everybody loved the idea and soon after the community started a rapid evolution of mesh protocols, beginning with MMRP (mobile mesh routing protocol). Berlin has now a mesh network with round 500 - 600 mesh nodes, used by many as their day to day internet communications infrastructure. I am using the Freifunk mesh every day as my internet uplink since 2004.