[CWN-Summit] Seeking advice on low-cost mesh node wifi in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

[Ben West]

Hello all,

I should first apologize if I am posing an oft-asked question, but I
find myself at an impasse, even after 2+ years of casual research and
spectatorship in the Mesh Node Wifi movement (not to mention twice
attending the CWN conference).  The diversity of participants in Mesh
Node Wifi is awesome, but it can make feasibility research difficult.

I work/volunteer at an activist community center (CAMP, stlcamp.org)
in south St. Louis, and a local foundation just put out an open call
for proposals for investing a substantial sum into community
revitalization projects in the neighborhood.

These 2 articles about an $8500 deployment of Meraki devices along a
2mile corridor in Kentucky motivated me to pitch a similar idea for
this St. Louis neighborhood:
http://www.govtech.com/gt/377232?topic=117699
http://www.wireless-nets.com/resources/tutorials/low-cost_mesh_hotzone.html

However, further research in Meraki has yielded some unpopular
business decisions they made just this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meraki#Criticism
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/24/1318226
http://www.dailywireless.org/2008/11/05/meraki-diy-munifi-for-10kmile/

I certainly understand Meraki's motivation to protect their market,
but my impression is that decisions to lock down hardware make their
products less viable in areas where wifi groups may face direct
competition from established ISPs.  (I.e. can't hack routers to
support QoS or customized captive portals).  The latter is actually
directly relevant to my proposal, since I'm aiming for a captive
portal hosting local ads to provide some operating revenue.

So, assuming you have a $10-$15k start-up budget (including equipment
purchase. deployment, AND marketing) for installing wifi along a
~2mile corridor with lots of 3story rooftops, what suggestions are out
there?

Meraki, and take your lumps?

Open-mesh.com, which is appealing since OpenWRT can be deployed to
legacy devices like residents' existing Linksys routers?

OpenWRT + Kamikaze + OLSRd (i.e. roll your own)?

Freifunk.net?

WifiDog for the captive portal + OpenWRT?

The basic, 1st order requirements for the Mesh network are such:

- Robust & stable (this will be a funded deployment, and sadly not a
dev project)
- Low-cost equipment (population density of this neighborhood makes
antenna strength 2nd order)
- Capacity for centralized admin console
- MAC tracking and auth (i.e. how many unique wifi clients have connected)
- Quality of Service (we anticipate lots of folks trying to run file
sharing, whether sanctioned or not)
- Customizable captive portal
- Ability to route to multiple DSL connections from different ISPs w/in the mesh

2nd order requirements

- Support for legacy routers (e.g. able to flash old Linksys products)
- Good transceiver strength
- Integration with PayPal-like subscription payments

3rd order requirements

- Mechanism to control per MAC access based on # bytes downloaded,
e.g. "We see you've downloaded 3GB this month w/o paying for your
access..."  This would be a very appealing way to provide limited free
access, i.e. make the service more competitive, but then enforce fair
cost sharing in case folks opt for sustained freeloading.
- Ability to dynamically divert sessions away from congested DSL
uplinks.  (I hope that having multiple DSL connections in the mesh
will give us composite reserve bandwidth we can actively allocate to
handle sporadic traffic peaks.)  Do conventional Mesh Node
implementations already support this?
- Ability for wifi clients to connect to each other (Meraki does not
support this)

4th order hopes and dreams

- Support for integrating a centralized squid-like HTTP caching
server.  I.e. commonly surfed traffic gets cached within the mesh.

I consciously anticipate this mesh node deployment to be a temporary
thing.  The goal is to establish a wifi-savvy neighborhood presence
that can use its collective buying power in the next few years to
transition to new technologies, White Space devices in particular.

Any suggestions would be gladly welcome.

-- 
Ben West
westbywest at gmail.com
http://savetheinternet.org