Stil wrote about the National Broadband Network in the recently released Federal Budget 2008 on Crickey with a follow-up post on his own blog: Rudd government delivers yesterday’s broadband.

It’s funny; just a couple of days ago when I met with David Mathews we were talking about something similar but with with the rollout of TransACT a few years back and how that network and infrastructure was obsolete before the project was completed.

And we’re about to see a repeat of that. In fact, as Stil says, other countries are already rolling out networks with speeds far above what is in the spec for this National Broadband Network.

So it seems we haven’t learned any lessons from previous such projects and we’re about to waste a whole lot of money doing it again - or are we? Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.

Wireless infrastructure on the other hand is far more scalable and easier to upgrade.

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.

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!

I’ve been unusually busy the last few weeks with life events - sister getting married, interstate travel and various things and I was noticing that I’m starting to fall behind on enquiries coming in regarding Merakis and Free Canberra Wireless; don’t worry, I have your emails and I will get to them ASAP! Also busy staying on top of my Technorati search feeds to follow up articles about Merakis, particularly in Australia, and advertising the Free The Net campaign and the specific geographic projects here and in Sydney: Free Canberra Wireless and Free Sydney Wireless respectively.

Also I loaned a Meraki Mini to @timriley at last week’s CTUB2 and I’m onselling the last Meraki Mini in my surplus cache I had to @gnoll110 tomorrow. No profit is made from sales - I’m not running a business here, although I have been talking to Meraki about the possibility of a reseller/distributor capability in Australia to get the currently prohibitive shipping costs down.

However today there’s been quite a bit of talk on the blogosphere and on Twitter about the recent media coverage from The Sydney Morning Herald with their article today on particularly the Free Sydney Wireless Meraki wifi project but the other projects around Australia, including our own Free Canberra Wireless get a mention. It’s pretty awesome that these projects that have only been going a few months get a write-up like that.

The article was also syndicated on The Age.

Laurel Papworth also blogged about the today’s article, as well as Matt over at Free Sydney Wireless. It also got a mention at ABC Digital Futures and Lifehacker Australia.

This is absolutely fantastic that this initiative is getting such exposure and becoming recognised as a serious option for rolling out large scale wifi networks where other corporate and even government-driven projects have failed.

Also if you are the proud owner of Meraki devices and have set up a network please remember to head over to the Meraki Network Mapper and add your network to the map! @facibus - I don’t see yours on there yet!

Found a cool little free wireless network scanner the other day that runs on Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) called WiFiFoFum. I’ve got it running on my i-mate JASJAM PDA phone at the moment and have been scanning the local wifi networks in my neighbourhood.

It can scan almost constantly (I’ve got mine running on a 1,000 ms rescan) and will display all the networks in a spreadsheet with SSID, signal strength, WEP on or off, type of node and some other figures.

Also I found an explanation for the RSSI (signal strength) values that WiFiFoFum displays - basically anything above -70 is good.

Would be nice if it could indicate CTD (Clear To Send) flag, and I’m a bit dubious of the radar display mode - but otherwise very cool, very useful (for someone planning to roll-out a large scale wifi mesh network). And there are a lot of wireless networks in our neighbourhood. About 20 in the distance from my house to the bus stop. Some of them are even open!

All I have to do is convince them all to piggy back a Meraki off their network …

When I first configured my mesh network some people were saying use “freethenet” as the SSID, others saying that’s obsolete now and just to use “meraki”. I ended up going with meraki, but I’ve since changed it to “meraki-freewifi”. If people are browsing wireless networks in their area and they see something with the name “meraki” and don’t know anything about it, even if it’s open they may not be inclined to investigate. You have a look at the SSIDs of wifi networks you could connect to in your area and see if you can determine from the name whether you’re invited to join them!

At least if I have “freewifi” in the SSID then people will know they’re welcome to connect; once they do then they’ll see the splash page and the browser ad banner and have ready access to more information about Meraki and the Free Canberra Wireless project.

In other news, my Meraki order arrived today - here are some pics of the Meraki Outdoor.

“What is an SSID?” on Wikipedia

Gary Barber posts some tips on setting up and troubleshooting your Meraki network.

Read the full article