Sorry for the rush and that I didn’t give you all a chance to place orders - but I was contacted by a guy in Hobart the other night interested in getting involved in the Free Australia Wireless project … and seeing I’m going to Hobart in a few weeks I thought I should grab a few Merakis to take with me! Plus I’ll be passing through Sydney on the way there so maybe the Sydney folk might need some, plus I have 3 people here in Canberra wanting Merakis.

So I’ve grabbed:

8x Meraki Minis
2x Meraki Outdoors
1x Meraki Panel Antenna

Also this news is a few days old now but if you haven’t heard the NSW Government has once again scrapped plans to roll out free wireless in the Sydney CBD and major areas. I think this is the third time now?

Just shows that even with a budget of millions of dollars - it’s just not the way to go about. It’s a flawed model and approach. It goes to show who has the greater power and influence and ability to make this happen. Us.

So how many nodes and access points have we got in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth now under the Free Australia Wireless project? Forty? Let’s add a few zeros to that figure. Let’s make this happen.

Another interesting article, brought to my attention by Justin: Free Wi-Fi, but Not for All

Read the story on Australian IT.

A wireless mesh network here would have helped as a redundancy mechanism - although even assuming that there was a saturation of nodes in place (and as far as I know there would be lucky to be half a dozen advertised open networks) to cover that sort of area is beyond the capability of a mesh network if there were no gateways in that region and the entire mesh was running off the closest gateway nodes to the communication blacked-out area; Meraki advises no more than 10 hops off a gateway, so with 200 metre range Meraki Outdoor units you could at best cases penetrate 2km into a suburb that has no gateway nodes operational. But still - that’s better than nothing. That could have reduced the number of affected homes and businesses by 20% in this case.

Just to illustrate another benefit of wireless mesh networks.

Having finally wrapped up my involvement with the very successful BarCampCanberra 2008, including all preparation before the event on 19 April and post-BarCamp tasks including processing and publishing 14 audio podcasts of presentations … I am now once again available to pick-up and continue with Free Australia Wireless which unfortunately I haven’t really touched since attending the Wireless World 2008 exhibition 4 weeks ago.

I’ve been fielding a few enquiries from local Canberra people interested in participating in the project and made contact with a few 3rd parties - community groups etc - but it’s time to start taking things to the next level; large-scale awareness and promotion campaigns, advocacy and lobbying local government. The upcoming ACT election in October I think will be a good opportunity to do this - I’ll shortly be contacting David Mathews, Labor candidate for Molonglo, who with his history in Information Technology will be an ideal contact point to start talking to local government about the Free Australia Wireless project in Canberra as I really think that we are going to need the cooperation, endorsement and support of local government and councils to roll out mesh network nodes particularly in business districts where it’s a bit trickier than just plugging a Meraki node into a residential ADSL-connected local network. We need to be able to assure local businesses of the legality of providing free wireless access without the need for a carrier licence.

As for ongoing research and such I’m still working on turning my Asus Eee PC into a router so I can provide free wireless via a Meraki device over a 3G USB modem; I’ll be using this to start providing free wireless in my workplace and once I have gained some interest and support for the idea then I plan to take the idea to our IT department … which takes me to the next point: content tracking, logging and filtering. I’ve been asked a few times about this and although I appreciate DFWFreeNet’s position on this I don’t think it’s a position that we can maintain - so we will be looking at options for hardware or software that sits between Meraki gateway nodes and wired networks for tracking usage at a detailed level and providing a level of additional firewall protection and content filtering to prevent the downloading of illegal content through free wireless networks.

Also, work is ongoing with preparing the content for the new and consolidated Free Australia Wireless website. JJ has been talking to the Open-Mesh people and made progress with getting them interested in gaining the necessary certification to start bringing Open-Mesh devices into Australia - which would be awesome given that they’re cheaper, fully open source … not to mention that Meraki (the company) hasn’t been very responsive, helpful or interested in assisting us so we are looking at other options.

If you’re going to connect to an open network - Meraki, free or simply open - it’s great if you’re able to drop them an email to say hi, maybe say thanks, introduce yourself (especially if you’re settling in to be a long-term WiFi resident on that network) … but at the very least it’s nice if you at least have a name.

Any name. A handle. An alias. Just name your device!

The Meraki Dashboard software is able to differentiate by MAC address so it won’t get confused by anonymous devices … but this is a little sad:

Where it says “Click to set” is where you can assign a name to a device for your own reference where that device connected to your network without a name.

Please give your laptop, phone, PDA or computer a name!

First day of the 2-day Wireless World 2008 tri-summit and exhibition, with JJ and myself working flat out all day promoting Free Australia Wireless, explaining how mesh networking works, what our plan is and some of the finer details … occasionally with some one-on-one sessions with people lasting over 20 minutes. We had about 90 fliers at the start of the day and finished up the day at 5:00pm with only 4 left.

Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways - although luckily most of the exhibition visitors had at least some basic knowledge of 802.11 and WLAN.

Also got some good contacts in government and other vendors that we can follow up in the coming weeks to discuss opportunities and gain support for Free Australia Wireless.

On the right here is a pic taken by Chris Rodrigues (one of the event organisers) of a 20 minute Meraki installation and configuration demonstration I gave yesterday in the main presentation area of the exhibition.

Unfortunately I had to return last night back to Canberra so today JJ, Matt and Ajay will be looking after the Free Australia Wireless stall, and Mark Pesce will be delivering his 30 minute presentation at the Wireless & Mobility Summit next door to the exhibition this afternoon.

Sorry, and how could I forget to recognise the assistance of Alison who came down to the stall yesterday just to say hi to JJ and myself … and ended up helping out with promoting Free Australia Wireless and answering questions about mesh networking topography and Meraki specifications - at one point even looking at the stall herself while JJ and myself had to go off at 3:30pm for the Meraki demo. Thanks Ali!

Also have a read of Mark Pesce’s latest blog post Everywhere which is what his presentation today will be based on.

JJ took some photos of the stall and my presentation and I’ve also put up an article on Norg.

If you can make it to the Wireless World 2008 exhibition in Darling Harbour next Wednesday or Thursday (2-3 April) please contact me for a free printable PDF ticket to the exhibition:

Email: nboehm [AT] purecaffeine [DOT] com
Mobile/SMS: 0409 288 464

From the Meraki High-Gain Omni-Directional Antenna fact sheet:

The Meraki High-Gain Omni-Directional Antenna can help extend the range of a Meraki Outdoor by refocusing the vertical signal to strengthen the horizontal signal.

This means that mounting a Meraki on a roof or second-storey with a booster antenna will actually result in lower signal strength below the unit compared with a normal antenna.

Below is the vertical polar chart of the Meraki booster antenna - so everything inside the shape is good signal strength, and you’re viewing it from side on; the optimal signal is like a big doughnut around the antenna:

As my Meraki Outdoor is mounted on my window on the second-storey of our house for optimal line-of-sight range it’s a bit tricky to actually extend the reach of the unit down to ground level … I’m currently doing some testing with the assistance of Rob who’s involved in the Free Canberra Wireless project and lives a couple of streets away.

Steve, Terence, Dean and Noel - I’ll email you shortly to arrange deliver; Brad, give me a couple of days and I can work out if I have a spare one for you, and “Griffmiester” I’ve put your two Minis + antennas aside to bring down to Melbourne at Easter.

COD is easiest for me, but I can provide bank details for direct deposit if you prefer.

Meraki antennas with standard antenna for scale
Meraki Outdoor with booster antenna

I might leave the order till tomorrow to give people an opportunity to comment; but so far the order I intend to place contains:

• 7x Meraki Mini
• 2x Meraki Outdoor
• 6x Meraki +7 dBi high-gain antennas

On-sell prices:

Meraki Mini: $65 AUD
Meraki Outdoor: $130 AUD
Meraki Antenna: $30 AUD

Manifest has been updated four times since original publication.

They should be here in about a week after placement of order.

It’s a good question. You probably pay $20-$70 per month for your ADSL broadband connection - somewhere around 512kbps to 12mbps (if you’re lucky enough to have ADSL2). You’ve probably got a download allowance of 5-30 gig. You may have a wireless router but it’s set up so only you can use it - using WEP encryption; you may not even broadcast your SSID. You pay for it, so why would you share it with other people?

Let’s look at something that happened several decades ago, starting in 1983 with the Free software movement and the creation of the GNU Project by Richard Stallman … which later in 1998 evolved into Open Source Software.

When Richard started this project he said “I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free” [source].

Nice - free software! That’s great for us … but why did he think people and particularly programmers would be interested in helping him in this mission? Why would people give up their own time without the payment they would receive developing proprietary commercial software? He believed that the commercialisation of software was breaking up the programmer community and was denying developers opportunities to interact with each other, to share … that it was removing the sense of community from the industry. He believed that this was so important that people would be willing to give up their time to bring this back.

And you know what? He was right. Because of that movement you can now buy your EEE PC for $500 because it’s running an open source operating system. Because of that movement Mozilla Firefox now represents 37% of the browser usage as at January 2008. You may use Internet Explorer still, but I believe it was the Mozilla project that has led the way and brought Microsoft back into line with supporting standards with the development of IE7. If you have a blog it’s probably running PHP and MySQL on Apache - all open source and free. You probably have several applications on your computer, even if you’re running Windows, that are open source.

Yet what have YOU contributed to this movement?

If you’re not a programmer, probably nothing. Yet the programmers who have given in some cases thousands of hours of their time into developing these desktop and web-based applications have done it for the community because they value that more than commercial remuneration.

Now we’re here in 2008 and we’re trying to get people involved in this wireless mesh network project - to open up their wireless networks at home, plug in a Meraki and let other people use your Internet connection.

This time we’re not calling for experience C++ programmers with computer science degrees to help develop the next Internet browser or next free operating system. We’re simply asking you take one of these wireless router devices and plug it into your network, to give something back to the community.

So what’s in it for you? You won’t make money out of this, no - but you will be doing something good. We’re only talking about sharing Internet here … but it’s a step away from the isolation of living in a house in a street of strangers. You will meet new people - people in your own street, in your own local community that you know you should already have introduced yourself to. I don’t want to get all touchy-feely with this post, but if thousands of people got on-board with the open source software movement there must be some value in it that means more to them than being paid.

The value of the dollar may fluctuate, the economy may go in recession … money is not everything. I encourage you to get involved in this project, get involved with your community, meet your neighbours! Drop me an email and I’ll be happy to help you come on-board.