Cutting the Cord Finlayson, and thousands like him all over the world, are crafting a new vision of Internet access, a cooperative, community-based endeavor that provides wireless high-speed bandwidth, eliminating monthly fees charged by telephone and cable companies.

These activists are cobbling together systems in garages and attics, taking the wired high-speed connections that come into their homes and throwing them open to neighbors. This utopian vision of free, high-speed access, any time and anywhere, is rooted in the earliest days of the Internet, when colleges and universities freely pooled computing resources and made them available to anyone connected to the system.