[CWN-Summit] Students tout WiFi co-ops as alternative to municipal WiFi

[David Young]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 04:57:31AM +0100, Aaron Kaplan wrote:
> 
> On Feb 8, 2008, at 11:16 PM, Stelios Valavanis wrote:
> 
> >care to elaborate?
> >
> >
> 
> hehe, ok.
> 
> well, there are a few points which bother me about meraki currently,  
> some of them:
> *) you can not run them without internet uplink. They need connection  
> to their billing system.
>   Without that they can not connect hence don't allow other mesh  
> nodes to be form a mesh.

I field many inquiries about CUWiN by current/prospective Meraki customers
who are frustrated by this aspect of the system.

> *) they run on very cheap HW which is sometimes what you want but  
> sometimes not what you want.
>   Particularly the single radio does not scale well. I wonder how  
> they plan to connect a whole city (SF) like that??

I contend that cheap hardware is always what one wants.  If multiple
radios/channels is what you desire, then velcro a few Meraki units
(or the equivalent) to an ethernet switch. :-)

> *) These atheros chips offloads the radio computation to the CPU.  
> Many packets? -> lots of CPU load -> packetloss

I can tell you quite confidently that that is not true.  Silicon in the
Atheros chip does the radio computation.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 ext 24