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

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Ben" == Ben West <westbywest at gmail.com> writes:

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

Ben> Meraki, and take your lumps?

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

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

Ben> Freifunk.net?

Ben> WifiDog for the captive portal + OpenWRT?

Another thing to look at is Ubiquity NanoStations.  They are not very
expensive and you can pretty easily use the 5.8GHz NanoStation5's
($90) as backhaul units to provide transport between buildings along
your corridor.  They are reflashable, but the stock firmware is pretty
good too.

We use WDS on a 5 roof network and the capacity on the backhaul has
always substantially exceeded our internet bandwidth.

The nice thing about WDS is that you can see all the mac addresses
from your gateway, making management pretty simple.


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net