Here is a query which I just sent out to the listserv for the Int'l Community Wireless Network group. Forwarding for those curious...
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ben West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 2:22 PM Subject: Seeking advice on low-cost mesh node wifi in St. Louis, Missouri, USA To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://savetheinternet.org -- Ben West [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://savetheinternet.org [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
