Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe,” sang K.D. Lang not too long ago. And in today’s modern world, add sunshine and wireless connectivity and you’re all set!

Now I’m thinking, consumer broadband access today is still plenty expensive. You see, when I signed up for the country’s first broadband access many years ago, I was paying almost RM90 per month. It was easy to justify then since we had “killer dial-up rates” at that point in time.

While bandwidth has grown marginally over the years (and traffic increased by leaps and bounds), I still find myself forking out close to RM100 for monthly Internet bills.

How so? Shouldn’t I be experiencing some kind of economy of scale by now seeing that everyone and their cat already has broadband access?

But like it or not, life today revolves around the Internet.

And I’m suspecting even with a technology as pervasive as WiMax (as what the telecommunications companies are claiming it to be), chances are, you won’t see much of a reduction in price for Net access.

With WiMax coming into the equation, it only means forking out more money for a new piece of hardware. Just compare the price difference between a third-generation (3G) card and Wi-Fi, and you get an idea of the economy of scale at work.

Wi-Fi however, is everywhere, and both the older “B” and newer “G” standards are interoperable – most newer notebooks support both standards. Any five-year-old notebook would have already have built-in wireless connectivity, the same goes for handheld devices.

Internet connectivity is almost as indispensable as your mode of transportation, but what if you hardly ever spend as much time online but still want an affordable Internet access?

My folks, for example, both do not have a high demand on bandwidth and have not ever spent more than an hour of online time. Forget about dial-ups, you’d end up paying more for less bandwidth. It’s a total waste of time.

Instead, I’m thinking along the line of setting up a small wireless community within the immediate neighbourhood. Wireless antennas that span from roof tops to roof tops in our neighbourhoods instead of each and everyone subscribing for a separate package.

We’re talking semi-detached blocks here, House A subscribes to an Internet service provider and shares the connection down to House B, C, D, E and F... wirelessly, of course.

If you feel bad about “leeching” from your good neighbour, you can always take turns to pay the monthly bills, or share out the monthly RM100, divide by six, and you pay less than RM18 a month.

Initial cost is a wireless router to act as a repeater, that should set you back around RM150 to RM250 while electricity bills is close to negligible. Of course, this can only work if all behave in a neighbourly manner.

This could very well turn into an ISP’s worst nightmare, and I’m sure many ISPs would have a clause against reselling the service.

However in this case, you’re well, merely sharing the service with all your neighbours. So how difficult is it to get cheap Internet connectivity?