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

[Ramon Roca]

The platform we've built at guifi.net is addressed to many of the things 
what you are asking for, which is about combining several features (wide 
hardware/firmware support, oriented to coommunity/self-managed but 
reliable open networks including residential access, monitored, 
scalable, provisioning for proxys, open source, etc...).
We're running it here for a +5,000 nodes / +6,000 kms.

We can talk deeper if you are interested.



En/na Ben West ha escrit:
> 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.
>
>