dailywireless.org » Personal Telco’s Independent Report on MetroFi Coverage

Personal Telco’s Independent Report on MetroFi Coverage

Two Personal Telco volunteers are conducting their own test of Portland’s free Wi-Fi project, reports the Oregonian.

Russell Senior and Caleb Phillips bid, unsuccessfully, to conduct the official evaluation of the city’s network but performed their own tests anyway. They will post their results on their website, Unwirepdx-watch.org tonight.

They plan to release their results at 6:30 tonight during PTP’s monthly meeting at Urban Grind Coffee, 2214 NE Oregon Street.

At OSCON last year, Personal Telco showed off some open source router experiments.

Russel Senior built a self-contained, battery-powered router using a Netgear WGT-634u (above) which can be configured as a self-contained, WiFi monitor using software similar to Net Stumbler. The WGT634u has a 200MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, 8M flash, and an Atheros AR5213-based 802.11b/g radio and can run Open WRT.

The self-contained device can record several hours of readings and can be battery powered, making it easy to mount on a bike or placed on the dashboard of a car. The router’s USB connection connects to an external GPS receiver and flash memory dongle.

Portland contracted with Uptown Services to perform the official test of the city’s network. Their findings are expected in mid-April.

Uptown Services has completed comprehensive testing of three commercially available Wi-Fi systems in Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Lompoc.

Using a notebook PC with GPS and custom software, Neil Shaw of Uptown Services says they gather performance data every 100 feet across the advertised service area. Parameters include coverage, data throughput, delay, packet loss, and loss of entire files.

Uptown’s Shaw has produced a whitepaper (pdf) that “should be enough to convince any City Manager or CIO that they should definitely include third party testing as part of their future RFP and/or contract for citywide Wi-Fi services”.

Uptown doesn’t match each City to their respective test results, “but you don’t need to know who is who to see that there is a major need for independent testing in this industry”, says Shaw.

If Portland signs off on MetroFi’s work after the testing results come in, MetroFi will quickly expand its network by activating about 250 more Wi-Fi antennas.

Left to Right: Adrian van Haaften, June Delany (MetroFi) and Logan Kleier (City of Portland)

DailyWireless editor Sam Churchill met with Logan Kleier, Project Manager, for Unwire Portland and two representatives from MetroFi, (Adrian Van Hafften, VP of Marketing and June Delaney, Director of Consumer Marketing) last week.

The goal of the meeting was to bring DailyWireless readers up to speed on the Portland, Oregon, MetroFi roll out, what consumers should expect and other issues of the Phase 1 network — now covering about 2.5 miles of downtown Portland, Oregon.

Logan Kleier said MetroFi is installing about 25 SkyPilot access points per mile. Since each AP covers about 1,000 ft, a matrix about 5X5 APs cover roughly one square mile. “Now you go to 10×10 APs (100 APs per sq. mile), said Kleier, that’s a 4 fold increase in cost - breaking every business model for municipal WiFi.” Kleier said while some residents could receive MetroFi indoors with common WiFi clients, people shouldn’t expect indoor coverage — it would simply cost too much to deliver.

Here’s a video explaining PersonalTelco’s Free Community Wireless project in the Mississippi Neighborhood.

Also at tonight’s Personal Telco meeting, Michael Burmeister-Brown, of the nonprofit NetEquality, will explain how they use the $50 Meraki box to bring wireless Web access to low-income housing.

In other news, SkyPilot Networks, the vendor of choice for MetroFi, says it has enhanced VoIP support with SyncMesh. Dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi VoIP phones, using the new version of SyncMesh enables 802.11e/Wi-Fi Multimedia for better performance over multi-hop, unlicensed mesh networks.

The Illinois tri-cities of Batavia, Geneva, and St. Charles hoped to get same free (ad-sponsored) Internet service now offered by MetroFi in Aurora, Illinois but were turned down. MetroFi now requires a city commitment to buy a block of services before offering their consumer-oriented, ad-supported WiFi service.