B. Mann Consulting

I dropped by Tod Maffin's favourite alleyway on Tuesday morning, and he grabbed a few soundbites from me about the FreeTheNet.ca community wireless project.

The audio is online now, and the clip will air tomorrow (Thursday, October 11th, 2007). The CBC's Spark blog has a short mention, too.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how the piece turned out. I didn't quite expect the whole thing to be about FreeTheNet -- Tod had originally mumbled something about additional wireless stuff, but turns out it's all about free wireless. The stress on "free" was a little strong...the interesting part really is when we can find a great ISP partner who sees the logic in promoting wider coverage, more customers, and the opportunity for additional applications by such coverage.

Thanks for the opportunity, Tod!

I just confirmed that I'll be on CKNW 980's The Christy Clark Show tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday, October 3rd, at 1:30pm).

I'll be talking about Vancouver's FreeTheNet.ca project. As Darren warned us, we're getting a fair bit of attention quite soon, which could be a bit problematic for a grass roots project. Incidentally, our second meeting is tonight (info on Upcoming) -- please come out if you are interested in getting involved or finding out more.

More background on Christy Clark and her show on Wikipedia and her website.

So, one day later (!!!), our concept of getting free wireless going in Vancouver is picking up a ton of steam. Here's the map of wireless nodes across Vancouver as of today:

I'm going to take a unit home, so there will be a South Granville location, too. Also check out the zoomed-in version of Gastown -- we could have really good coverage in no time.

We had Lyal from Outcome3 come and buy a unit, and Jennifer from Elastic Entertainment. Raincity Studios, who are going to be sharing our office here at 1 Alexander, are going to unwire their side of the office as well. I'm thinking Chill Winston is going to see some more laptop users soon. I think Kris Krug narrowly beat out Joe Bowser to be the first "home" node up. Wow...and that's day 1!

How to buy a Meraki wireless mesh node in Vancouver

We've currently got a stack of Meraki units from Mike West sitting in the Bryght offices. If you are a business or individual, contact Bryght or stop by during business hours and we'll configure a unit and sell it to you. If you're a regular home user, the Meraki Mini will do just fine.

What do you need? Nothing more than a network connection. If you buy more than one, they will automatically form a mesh so you can cover a wider area. Need help configuring? We'll do what we can to get you up and running -- Joe Bowser is our official hardware/network geek.

We'll hurry to get Vancouver.FreeTheNet.ca set up early next week, so we can promote everyone that is running nodes. Ideally, we'll get an interface (and coverage!) like the San Fran network, where we can keep the map updated in real time.

Join the FreeTheNet Google Group to stay in touch.

Seems like the wireless meetup tonight went really well.

We had a good selection of folks come out, and I know I learned a lot. Joe Bowser is software and hardware hacker extraordinaire and taught us a bunch, while Mike West has already imported a stack of Meraki units so we can get started experimenting with mesh right away.

We talked a lot about some of the other solutions out there, from hacking Netgear units to MIT Roofnet. At the end of the day, the Meraki units "just work", and we are at this point more interested in experimenting with good mesh coverage than diving into more hardware or software hacking. While Meraki isn't fully open source, the firmware is open, and we're confident that the Meraki software could be replaced in the future if necessary.

Mike shared with us his experiences in getting larger numbers of Meraki units into Canada, especially modified outdoor units from NetEquality. NetEquality is another organization out of Portland (the original FreeGeek started in Portland, too) that is a non-profit which "provide[s] planning, deployment resources and internet mesh products worldwide and install[s] free network hardware in qualified communities in the Pacific Northwest".

We spent some time talking about working with other local groups: BCWireless.net, Vancouver Community Network, Free Geek Vancouver, and Mobile Muse.

Graham from Tooth and Dagger proved perfect in asking lots of great questions. We settled on trying to answer the question, "What would it take to cover Water Street to Waterfront Station with mesh wireless?" The estimate is that we could need as little as 15 units, and there are a good handful of local Gastown businesses who are already interested. Basically, we'll consider this a "Phase 0" of experimentation where we test getting a mesh up and running, monitor bandwidth usage, and so on. Much longer term, wouldn't it be interesting if some of the many large towers from Yaletown to the West End could be educated in running a mesh node, rather than the 100s of overlapping wifi routers in place today.

Mike has left this pile of Meraki units at the Bryght offices -- I'll confirm the pricing tomorrow, but around $75 for the indoor unit and $125 for the outdoor one. If you want one for personal use, for your business, for anything, you can come buy one (or several!). More details on this in the next couple of days.

Bryght is going to put an outdoor unit on the roof, Raincity Studios is moving in and will probably stick a unit in the front window. Joe works at Nitobi and already has a unit on the roof. If we can start by covering the first block from Alexander to Abbott, that will be an excellent start: then we can start talking to the Gastown Business Improvement Association and the other local businesses.

Lastly, in scheming over beer later, Mike shared that he has the domain FreeTheNet.ca. For now, we'll go under the working assumption that we'll use Vancouver.FreeTheNet.ca as the working name for the group, and start building out things like a list of locations of nodes, as well as a write up how people in other cities can get started as well.

Want to continue the discussion? Join the FreeTheNet.ca Google Group. Tentatively, we planned for another meet up on October 11th.