Just letting you know that Free Australia (Canberra) Wireless will be sponsoring the upcoming port80 meeting to be held in Sydney the night before the Web Directions South 2008 conference (25-26 September) at the Harlequin Inn on the 24th of September and contributing to the bar tab.

Also we’ll probably also be sponsoring the main conference itself … just got to finalise that soon.

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 Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Once again - if you’re in Sydney then it’d be great if you could drop by the Free Australia Wireless exhibition stall at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre (stall #65) and say hi.

The plan is that I’ll be driving up tomorrow morning (leaving Canberra around 5:00am) and will be behind the stall with JJ and Ajay tomorrow, and then on Thursday it’ll be JJ and Matthew. Also Mark Pesce will be giving a half-hour presentation to the (paying) Wireless World convention participants on the Thursday.

We will be giving a 20 minute demo of Merakis and maybe JJ’s new FON tomorrow at 3:30 - that demo will be in the free area of the exhibition.

Email: nboehm [AT] purecaffeine [DOT] com
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