Yeah I can't find a way to do free. Even the folks I know that have server farms can't give away the bandwidth when they are charging a minimum $400 a month for a server.
There seems to be quite a few public servers out there already. The tricky part is getting us all together at the same time on the same server. Rox is currently one of our favorites. However, not everyone may be able to ping to it very well. This is why I suggest that we each pick out our favorites, and list them in the table here. Another free alternative would be for us to all install xfire. (i don't know if it supports bf2 yet, but it would be a more efficient way for us to meet live rather than on a chat thread.)
Check out my comments and link to xfire in week 1. I was so impressed with it, that it more or less inspired me to come up with this thread.
I rented a BF server from EA games. Everyone chipped in for about a year, and when they stopped chipping in, guess who got to foot the bill. I was in debt up to my eyeballs.