Free Canberra Wireless is a site dedicated to coordinating the roll-out of a city-wide free Internet access wifi mesh network.
This site is currently managed and updated by Nathanael Boehm.
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:
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.
Following on from yesterday’s coverage of Free Sydney Wireless with mention of other free wifi projects around Australia including our own Free Canberra Wireless in The Sydney Morning Herald (which I blogged about yesterday) we have been contacted by Association and Communications Events (ACE) who run Wireless World with an absolutely awesome offer: a free promotion stand/stall at Wireless World 2008 which is happening in Sydney on 2-3 April and also possibly a slot in the conference schedule to present - we’re currently in a mad rush to put together some ideas for our presence at the conference and line up a speaker; we have about 40 hours from now to get back to them with our response … but we’re definitely going ahead with at least the stall, which I’ve been told may be placed next to Google or Nokia.
I spoke to Chris from ACE this afternoon and talked about Free Canberra Wireless, Free Sydney Wireless and other similar initiatives around the country. I believe Matt also setup a Facebook group for Free Melbourne Wireless today. Also I explained BarCamp to him as he had heard that there was a BarCampSydney planned for the weekend before or after the Wireless World 2008 conference and was considering cross-promotion opportunities or perhaps some sort of integration.
He’s really keen on the idea of rolling out city-wide mesh networks at a community grassroots level (as am I, obviously) and it’s very cool that he’s managed to swing this for us simply because he believes in the concept and wants to support it.
I plan on going up for the conference to help man the stand/stall and be involved in anything else we get happening - although I won’t be presenting. Public speaking at that level is a little out of my league.
Very exciting times!
Also, in light of recent burst of interest and acceleration of the project I will be placing an order with Meraki next Thursday 21 February. I’ll be getting a few surplus units but if you’re interested please let me know just so I can make sure you’re covered. I’ll also be getting some booster antennas around the same time. Onselling price for the Meraki Mini units - which is cost price, no profit to me - will be $60 with this shipment as I should be able to get a discount on bulk shipping and by keeping it under the $1,000 import tax threshold (which we unfortunately invoked on the last shipment, cancelling out the discount we got on bulk shipping).
Free Sydney Wireless is probably organising a shipment soon too - drop by the FSW Facebook group if you’re interested.
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.
Ordered 3 indoor Meraki Minis and 1 outdoor unit yesterday - I’ll probably replace one of my indoor units with the outdoor one and two of those Minis will be for the web-blast07 sponsorship - leaving me with two Minis surplus, which I’ll be trying to flog off to the neighbors to expand my pureCaffeine network here in Amaroo.