Boston’s citywide wireless Internet access plan is faltering, notes Boston.com, but a grass-roots effort may step in to provide “bubbles” of service
“We still have very ambitious plans to move this across the whole city,” said Bill Oates, the city’s chief information officer. “But we’re not sure how long it’s going to take or what the technology model is going to be. We’re learning that we have to take it one step at a time.”
City leaders insisted they aren’t backing away from their ultimate goal of Wi-Fi in every corner of Boston. Instead, they said, they’re abandoning their original timetable to refocus on a series of neighborhood “bubbles” that test technology and business models.
Boston’s initial effort offered universal coverage for the Grove Hall/Dudley Square Wireless Pilot Network was launched on March 31, 2008 in a ‘Wire Cutting’ ceremony hosted by Mayor Thomas Menino. But it was completed nine months behind schedule and required more than 60 broadband routers, many more than anticipated.
According to the city, the area contains about 8,000 households, only 25 percent of which are estimated to have a computer and some form of Internet access. The pilot network is expected to cover about 1 square mile in both Dorchester and Roxbury.
While the Grove Hall pilot deployed BelAir Networks hardware and software. Galaxy Internet Services is the Internet Service Provider (ISP), BelAir Networks provided the pilot’s radios, metroNEXT provided the backhaul for the network, and AboveNet provided the wireless network’s connection to the World Wide Web.
OpenAirBoston says the next phase of the Wi-Fi buildout, will provide pockets of service in the Fenway and Mission Hall neighborhoods. It will use mostly donated equipment and services from business and foundations and will utilize mesh networking along with free “open source” software installed on off-the-shelf hardware, although the type of hardware and software was not specified.
“The approach for this pilot is not to cover a neighborhood but to test a technology,” said Pamela Reeve, chief executive of OpenAirBoston, the nonprofit corporation established by the city to manage the Wi-Fi program.
In related news, Portland’s Personal Telco Project is holding a free workshop on how to connect to the free wireless network in Portland’s Boise neighborhood (see: PersonalTelco Building Free Cloud in Portland).
PersonalTelco will have available 6 complete desktop computers (courtesy of Free Geek) with wifi radios for adoption and placement either in peoples homes or in public locations. Additionally, the non-profit, 501(c)3 WiFi volunteer group will have up to 20 wifi cards to give away to people with laptops that don’t have working wifi radios already.
The free workshop is being held tomorrow (Saturday) at the Albina Youth Opportunity School at N. Mississippi and Beech (map), starting at 1 pm. Club secretary Russell Senior called up the neighborhood association, pitched the idea, then got donated gear from Free Geek — for free.
A year ago, the $50 Meraki WiFi repeater looked like a revolution — an ideal solution for bridging the digital divide. Then Meraki Jacked Up the Price and stripped the low cost unit of most of its features (FAQ). The standard edition now doesn’t allow billing, user authentication, access control or a custom splash page. You’ll have to pay $100 more per node for most of features that previously came “free”. Meraki is now pushing advertising via their Hosted Services.
Last month, Portland’s Michael Burmeister-Brown announced a new product and company designed to fill the void left by Meraki — Open-Mesh.
Open-Mesh does everything the original Meraki did — and more:
- It’s inexpensive. Open-Mesh WiFi repeaters cost $49 each or $39.95 (qty 20)
- It’s Ad free. Open-Mesh promises they will never push ads into your networks. You decide what, if any, content you want to display.
- It’s 100% open source and deployed on top of OpenWRT. You can change anything.
- You can re-flash the firmware if you want.
- The Dashboard management system provides free administration, alerting and mapping. It allows you to configure the ESSID, splash page, passwords, and Bandwith allocation of your networks.
- The devices auto-configure. It’s simple to create a neighborhood or apartment network. You don’t need to use their management system if you don’t want to.
Unlike Meraki and FON, their architecture is 100% open source. You can re-flash the firmware if you want. Put up a new splash page. Use their free management software (below) — or not.
The small mini-routers ($49) come pre-flashed with ROBIN open-source mesh firmware. It is ready to plug in and use. No configuration necessary.
You plug one into your DSL or other Internet connection and put additional mini-routers where you want Internet access to extend the WiFi range (each router should be within 100 feet of another router). They like Covad because they support WiFi sharing but other broadband providers can be used. Open-Mesh doesn’t have a business relationship with broadband providers
The router comes with a 2dbi antenna and Ethernet cable to connect to your DSL or computer. It uses the same Atheros chipset used in the Meraki.
ROBIN (ROuting Batman Inside) is an Open Source mesh network project, deployed on top of OpenWRT. It uses the BATMAN routing algorithm (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.
