Plug-and-Play Wi-Fi for Cities and Towns

[MrMick]

Meraki hopes it can succeed where larger players such as Earthlink and Google failed: Making a business out of providing the infrastructure for citywide Wi-Fi systems.

Plug-and-Play Wi-Fi for Cities and Towns : Read more

 

[ubuntun00b]

Can you do this with a wireless router? COMCAST Modem to AP to AP to AP to AP? If we can get a block party together, Im sure we all can get 12mbs for 10 bucks a month?

The problem is the range. How the heck does radio signals travel so far? Huge antennas? If we as a city, and a people get together with one another, Im sure we can get service on our Streets and avenues for cheap right? Instead of offering service per household, we should get service for our whole street. Wouldnt that be sweet.

 

[nekatreven]

99.9% percent of companies try and do this one of two ways.

1. Use a variant of normal wifi gear that is hopped up on amps and huge antennas to form the mesh.

2. Use equipment that is actually designed for this kind of thing (motomesh and the like, and even they have issues).

Option number one ALWAYS gives you a shitty network. Option number two results in a cost per square mile that frightens the treasurers of even the most well off cities. Out of all the cities that have looked into this or tried it I've only ever heard of two that didn't crash and burn instantly.

No one will ever make a successful business out of trying this crap with just 2.4ghz equipment (and if they do they're just taking the money and running when the network turns out to suck).

and @ubuntun00b... No ones dsl or cable by itself is going to have enough bandwidth, and good luck using more than one connection on those proprietary, ISP provided modem/router/AP/voip combo boxes. Half the nodes wouldn't be able to get the built in wifi turned off and the stand-alone AP turned on. Even if they do you'll break SSL, vpn, and a whole slew of other things right out the gate.

Many smart companies have tried this planning for a good fiber pipe every other city or so and they failed...anyone adding that much load balancing on residential connections will only fail that much worse.

 

[jhansonxi]

You can do a lot of things with economy wireless routers by replacing the firmware with OpenWrt. There are many different protocols with trade-offs of performance and reliability under various loads:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

 

[benjaminsebastian1]

Check out Steve Pierce's blog, he's figured out how to make wifi work in a city: http://concentratemedia.com/blogs/posts/StevePierce2029.aspx

 

[MrMick]

Yes, he's using Meraki's equipment.

 

[Milleman]

Shouldn't this be possible by using just an ordinary WiFi router from Dlink, Linksys etc...?

 

[Guest]

I have a similar idea that could save millions. I use these D cell flashlights and color plastic wrap to create traffic lights that really work.

I've got the cost down to $12 for a standard three signal light and plan to sell them to cities for $100 versus the thousands they spend today on those big clunky things you see everywhere.

OK - I'm yanking you and so is this vendor. 1st, wifi doesn't do outdoors in (proven by all the failed muni wifi systems), 2nd, cheap isn't a design criteria it's almost always a way to guarantee failure!

I predict we see this company out of business before the new year!