Management of community Wi-Fi network

摘要

Various technologies described herein pertain to managing and accessing a community Wi-Fi network. The community Wi-Fi network can include sharer computing devices in differing local networks that share respective network bandwidth capacities with consumer computing devices. Feedback information pertaining to network bandwidth capacity available at different geographic locations covered by the community Wi-Fi network can be collected and evaluated to enable generation of maps for visualizing coverage of the community Wi-Fi network. A consumer computing device can display a map that includes visual information pertaining to the geographic coverage of the community Wi-Fi network relative to a geographic location of the consumer computing device. Community Wi-Fi network coverage can be analyzed to detect geographic locations at which network coverage is desirably added; network coverage can be added by incentivizing a potential sharer computing device to opt in to share network bandwidth capacity or controlling beamforming of sharer computing device(s).

主权项

1. A method of operating a consumer computing device, comprising:
receiving, at the consumer computing device, network coverage data indicative of geographic coverage of a community Wi-Fi network, wherein the community Wi-Fi network comprises sharer computing devices in differing local networks that share respective network bandwidth capacities, wherein the geographic coverage of the community Wi-Fi network is a union of geographic coverages of the sharer computing devices that share the network bandwidth capacities available to the differing local networks, and wherein the community Wi-Fi network is accessible by the consumer computing device within the union of the geographic coverages of the sharer computing devices using the network bandwidth capacities of the differing local networks shared by the sharer computing devices; and displaying a map on a display screen of the consumer computing device, the map comprising visual information that specifies the geographic coverage of the community Wi-Fi network in a geographic region that comprises a geographic location of the consumer computing device.