[CUWiN-Dev] Meraki Introduces First Solar Powered Outdoor WiFi Access Kit

[Bob Keyes]

We've been fiddling around with wind and solar mesh nodes for a while.
It's much more problematic than it seems at first. The problem is that the
rated output power of wind and solar panels is very far from what you can
actually obtain. Boston isn't the sunniest city, but we do have plenty of
wind.Next comes batteries - you have to have something that is efficient,
inexpensive, and is build for the charge/discharge cycles that are
appropriate to the technology. Of course, all this has to be coupled
together somehow, so you need a solar panel voltage converter and a
battery charger, and battery chargers are specific to battery technology.

Most importantly, and this is where I am dubious about Meraki's low-cost
and small solar mesh node, it has to be robust. Between the power source
and the batteries, there has to be enough power available even in
unfavorable conditions. What level of uptime are you looking for? I doubt
that Meraki can provide even 99% availability on a yearly basis. I'd
expect 90% or even less. Of course this varies quite a bit by location.

The nodes where alternative power is most useful tends to be the same
nodes in which reliability is key. Nodes mounted high on rooftops or in
strategic locations are sited to give great increases in connectivity and
performance. They'll tend to be they key nodes of the network. If you can,
it is probably worth trying to find a way to bring Ethernet up to these
key sites, and make them gateways (these key gateways will have to fight
congestion in the wifi channel - by being a gateway, they reduce the
number of packets which have to be sent up to 50%), and power to nodes
over ethernet, in which case solar or wind power is rather moot. But even
without Ethernet, the nodes will likely pass much more traffic than nodes
in less optimal locations, meaning an increase in power consumption, and
more demand on the batteries. One way to fix this problem is by purposely
making the nodes inferior, by the use of low-power wifi radios and tiny
antennas. As the Meraki nodes I have seen so far have been weak in this
this area, there's a great probability that Meraki will use this method to
attempt to solve the problem of power demands.

If you've got a really good site, which can range and performance to the
network, why waste it with underpowered equipment? For a lot of sites, it
makes more sense to spend $500-$800 or more on a quality node with enough
power generation and storage capacity, which are built to survive the
extreme weather conditions, than to buy The $150 Meraki solution.

On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, dan blah wrote:

> http://meraki.net/news/2007/06/03/meraki-introduces-first-solar-powered-outdoor-wi-fi-access-kit/
>
> will be awesome when we can use all of this stuff.
> --
> Daniel
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