Architecture for sharing residential access with roaming WLAN users

Many countries have relatively densely populated areas where the populace concentrates around urban centres. The access capacity used to connect these homes to the Internet is often not fully consumed, either because of the low-range subscription selection or because the user is not on-line. If the residential equipment within these urban areas is used to provide access to casually passing users, a contiguous radio coverage landscape of WLAN access points is potentially obtained. This paper describes the challenges and the solutions when the surplus capacity available in the broadband access residential connection is used to offer WLAN access to users who casually pass a residential area. The focus is on the architecture that functions as a framework to solve the technical challenges that rise when using unlicensed bands for public network access.