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

[Michael Weinberg]

On Feb 9, 2008, at 12:32 PM, David Young wrote:

>> *) 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. :-)

I concur. I've seen a lot of expensive "pro" gear deployed and demoed  
(e.g. hundreds of SkyPilots in the failing MetroFi network) and I'm  
unconvinced that these offer much in the way of actual wireless  
improvements. Frequently, you're getting radio/antenna combos that  
broadcast the SSID much further than clients can reasonably connect  
and complex, feature-drunk firmwares. A cheap radio with a separate  
linux device handling complex routing or authentication and some  
specialized antennas can accomplish this just as well, without locking  
you into the configuration provided by a single $2-3K device.