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

Stelios Valavanis stel at onshore.com
Sat Feb 9 14:45:12 CST 2008


the bit about the billing system pretty much answers my question about how 
they do it. i was referring to their operational model. that alone is a deal 
killer for me. to david's point about dual radio that works for community 
organically built networks. but in a muni network you really want other than 
2.4ghz for backhaul mesh.

On Saturday 09 February 2008 2:32:15 pm David Young wrote:
> 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


-- 
_______________________________________
stel valavanis  http://www.onshore.com/


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