Re: [PLUG] Wireless network - Swarthmore

[Chris "Magnus" Hedemark <chrish@trilug.org>]

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On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 07:19 PM, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> Are you thinking along the repeater-down-the-tracks line or the
> wifi-while-waiting-for-a-train line?

For now, the latter.

I think that when this is no longer vaporware, and interest picks up 
outside of the niche enthusiast community, we can look at things like 
un-wiring major highways, train tracks, etc.

But I don't want to get bogged down in working out the mobility 
protocols until after some of the backbone is in place and those who 
are shelling out for access points are able to reap some of the 
benefits of the network.  Shake the bugs out with the static locations, 
and then attack the mobility issues.

Once mobility issues are worked out, the idea of surfing the net while 
riding the train becomes very feasible.  Or running a 'puter in your 
car that is connected to your home network while you're driving up 476 
or 76.  Once mobility issues are worked out, at that point I would be 
much more interested in blanketing major throughfares. :)

> You're safe on trees, but I think you get better coverage of the
> business district on the Park side from my place. Not so much with
> the Chester side, but there's not much space to park there. My place
> (or Occasionally Yours) can hit the porches on the back of the
> Shirer Building (the big one next to the PNC at the corner of
> Chester and Rutgers) better; Michael's would run into the radio
> shadow problem from the building across the alley from the Shirer.
> (I type this from my back porch--where the wifi works just fine as
> it is, thanks ;^>--looking at the situation.)

You've got a much better handle on that area than I do.  :-) And I 
think that there is enough momentum building in Swarthmore to maybe put 
multiple AP's in the vicinity if some other interested parties stepped 
forward to fill in the voids.

> That'd be a hard sell in certain cases. I'm confident of my place
> and the building on either side.

Heck anything would be an improvement right now.

> Oh, hey, wait, the one farther towards Chester than Renato's is a
> totally safe bet, actually. That's Alan (again, first name only in
> public), whose contact info I'll send you as well. He's the lawyer
> who runs e4n6 ("ee-for-en-sics", get it?), and is already totally
> into the idea of a mesh. You're likely to get a fair amount of help
> with organization and publicity from him too, something I don't
> really have the energy for. (Nothing personal, but there's other
> stuff that's more interesting to me. I'll obviously take part, but
> the organizing is more stress I don't need right now. :^>)

Yeah I would love to meet with all the Swarthmore people at some point 
when the proof of concept is done and the initial whitepapers are done. 
 And I'm hoping that a natural leader for each town will rise to the 
top to handle local "evangelism", address space allocation, peering 
arrangements with nearby towns, etc.  I'm going to end up getting a 
large chunk of address space out of this but would like to have local 
coordinators handle breaking down smaller chunks appropriately, 
handling the OSPF issues on AP's bordering other towns, etc.  For 
example, if you start bumping up against Springfield, you'll need to 
have the bordering AP's advertise routes for both Springfield & 
Swarthmore.  The people setting up those nodes probably won't know 
this, but a local coordinator looking at a node map will be able to 
figure it out easily.  As for local evanglism, again the node map is a 
great tool for seeing where the holes are and trying to get people on 
the fringe of the network to host their own nodes.

Swarthmore is probably the best place to sort all these issues out 
given the strong initial interest there.
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