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

Stelios Valavanis stel at onshore.com
Tue Nov 18 13:13:21 CST 2008


wow what are you using? cuwin? how many backhaul connections for 5000 nodes?

On Tuesday 18 November 2008 12:54:43 pm Ramon Roca wrote:
> 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.ht
> >ml
> >
> > 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> CWN-Summit mailing list
> CWN-Summit at lists.cuwireless.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/cwn-summit

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


More information about the CWN-Summit mailing list