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April 4, 2008

Boston Moves to Bubbles of Access

By Glenn Fleishman

The term “hotzone” is passé, apparently: The Boston Globe reports that efforts to build a city-wide Wi-Fi network in the cradle of liberty have faltered, with only hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a $15m goal raised; a retailoring of plans for more modest, inexpensive pilots; and the potential departure of the volunteer CEO in favor of a paid leader.

Still, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to retool: with no money on hand, with no commitment from the city, with the first pilot in place, rethinking the project as a series of lit-up areas makes just about as much sense as anything; cf., Houston.

The article notes that the company is switching from the BelAir equipment to free software installed on off-the-shelf hardware. There’s no such product that I’m aware of that could scale for these efforts. There’s off-the-shelf and commercial, paying for the management part (RoamAD); off-the-shelf and sort of open, but not commercial without paying for it (LocustWorld); open-source based but proprietary hardware (Meraki); proprietary all around, even if it has open-source components (BelAir, SkyPilot, Cisco, Motorola, Tropos, etc.); Roofnet (various components, but the team is now mostly working at Meraki); free, open-source, and open hardware (CUWiN, seemingly in abeyance).

So…what are they using?

Update: Stephen Ronan writes in to suggest it might be OLSR or Open-Mesh. (Open-Mesh, the company, uses RO.B.IN, a full-blown firmware package for Atheros AP51 devices that stands for Routing Batman Inside; B.A.T.M.A.N. is an algorithm: better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking; B.A.T.M.A.N. is also instantiated as software that can be installed on appropriate Linux-based routers. Holy flash memory!)

Posted by Glennf at April 4, 2008 9:53 AM

Categories: Municipal

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