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 Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.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.

4 Ways to Keep Your Public Wi-Fi Sessions Secure

Some good tips - including setting up a VPN; something I have little experience with (especially for this purpose) but will be looking in to!

And I’ve managed to register an account over at the Aus/NZ Meraki user group forum site Merakeye.com after some technical difficulties which with assistance from the forum admin we discovered was a delay caused by phpBB attempting a reverse MX record lookup on my domain causing a MySQL connection timeout.

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.

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.

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.

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!

It’s a valid point that’s been raised several times - and although I’m no network security expert I know enough to hopefully be able to explain mesh networking from a security point of view to alleviate your concerns.

Firstly - do you honestly believe that your computer and home network are completely secure? The only way you can guarantee that is to unplug from the Internet, disable all your wireless networking, Bluetooth and IR communication features on your computer(s) and ensure all network cabling is physically secure in your house. And then on top of that never stick a floppy disk, CD-ROM or USB thumbdrive in your computer. Just to be safe, don’t install any software either … in fact don’t even turn your computer on.

That might sound a little over the top … but it’s true. If you use Bluetooth, or you’re connected to the Internet and you install software you are taking risks. Security risks. We mitigate the risks through the use of firewalls, anti-virus software, requiring authentication to log onto a computer and physical security of our home computer … nevertheless you are taking risks.

Now the reason I’m saying this is because I need to give you some context for my next statement:

Merakis are not secure.
They do not encrypt data.

Doesn’t this mean that if we use Merakis or connect to a wireless mesh network we’re leaving ourselves wide open to attack by the hordes of malicious hackers out there?

No.

See this diagram below:

It shows a computer (could be yours) connecting through a wireless router (in this example, not a Meraki) to a server via the Internet; could be a website or your Internet Banking, however in this example we’re connecting via SSL (for example 128-bit) and WEP (probably 64-bit).

Is this situation secure? We call it secure - because no-one likes to hear “mostly secure”. A couple of months ago the UK Government lost data disks with the personal information including banking information of 7.25 million families. I refer to that incident because even if your connection from your computer to the server via the Internet is (mostly) secure that information is not encrypted before you type it in and once it exits the SSL-WEP tunnel at the far side (otherwise it would be of no use to the business you’re providing personal information to).

In the early days of e-commerce you might have provided your credit card details on a “secure” website (even using SSL) … and that information would be transmitted, encrypted, through the tunnel … and then wind up as a plain text email in a staff member’s inbox where they would then manually type that into an EFTPOS terminal. It’s not that bad anymore as human involvement in the payment processing loop has been largely replaced by payment gateways - nonetheless I want you to realise the sorts of risks you take every day.

Now in the Meraki model, that WEP encryption from the computer to the wireless router (the Meraki) is not there. If you’re using Internet Banking that SSL encryption is still in place, with a 128-bit key which is quite secure. But any non-SSL encrypted data from your computer to the router is being sent as plain unencrypted data packets. That’s only for people connecting via wireless networking. If you’re hardwired into the router with CAT5 cabling and leaving Meraki wireless open for other people then this is not an issue for you.

But what about those hordes of hackers out there?

In risk management we weight risks based on their likelihood and consequence. What is the likelihood of someone within range of your wireless network (100 feet?) having the equipment, software and skills to capture your data packets and assembling them or extracting text strings? If they did manage to do that, what is the consequence of them knowing what web pages you’ve downloaded … because remember your Internet Banking is still secure using SSL, so this is just plain ol’ web browsing.

Now put this in the context of the myriad of other information security risks with your computer and your network … and hopefully you’ll realise that this is really nothing to be worried about - though of course you should take it into consideration as with all security issues as part of a general computer and network security risk management and planning.

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 …