Announcing a Community Wi-Fi Mesh

Xarion said:
look guys i dont know why we are bothering to give out our advice, all we are doing its helping him with stuff we've spent so many hours perfecting, we'll let wifi mesh do their commercial thing and we do ours there is no point in arguing ourselves blue in the face
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I agree... this chap has no intention of listening, and all he wants to do is sell Videos on a network the users paid for.

/me signing out
 
Iliyan said:
A message to the not so bright, who will stare at the above figure with amazement: We are building Wi-Fi mesh, not you garden variety, illegal, Wi-Fi star topology networks like the ones WUGs and myriad of WISPs have deployed. But you knew that already, did not you?
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Just answer my questions?

You are surely doing a great job of bridging the digital divide, by NOT deploying in previously disadvantaged areas, and by selling equipment for 3-4 times more than their normal price?
 
Ryder_JHB said:
Iliyan,

I am a techie at heart, and have a couple of questions related to the equipment etc if I may...

Can you explain what type (model, manufacturer etc) of AP's you would be looking at using (For R2000 according to your site)? How are you planning on tackling the routing between these ad-hoc nodes? If an external antenna is required for a member to connect, what type of antenna would you be utilising?

What exactly is contained within this Multi-Media library you keep referring to? Your site states latest blockbuster titles? How have you managed to obtain permission to re-broadcast these titles? How are you able to charge "members" a fee to access these titles?

How are your Wifi Communities going to be linked together, equipment wise? What are you planning on using to achieve this? Do you have access to proper highsites, or will you just be using the tallest building in each community? (If so, how are you going to obtain permission to use these buildings?)

Lastly, Please enlighten me as to how you are planning on linking each wifi community to this "Internet Backbone" that you speak of? And what kind of speeds, latency etc are we talking about?

Most of the thread so far has been, shall we say, rather heated - and I understand where my fellow "Brothers" are coming from, but I would just love for you to explain the Technical side to us!

Ryder
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I am ignoring most of the above posts, as they add no value to this discussion whatsoever. Guys, grow up!

Ryder_JHB,

I am only going to answer your technical question - the ones that have strong commercial nature are none of your business.

Our routing algorithm is SrcRR. No external antenna is required (nor permitted, if is going to cause exceeding the 20dbi EIRP limit)

Please visit www.wifi-mesh.co.za for details on how the wifi community members will link together.

The detailed component description of our Internet Gateways is not for publication. I have already disclosed most of its technical features though - it is a direct link (one hop - one router here at the mesh linked to a router that is directly connected to a Tier1 ISP in the US via 622Mbps link), 2Mbps, asymmetrical, via VSAT, lowest in the world contention ratios for a consumer level Internet connection, lowest possible latency for a one hop out of SA link - we measure fixed latencies of 285ms between user PC and a host located at the Backbone when the links are at low utilisation state (yes, I realise that I am an old generation, but this is how we used to refer to that part of the Internet at the days gone by)

I know you (as well as many others) are tempted to ask me the commercial question how do we do that at a low cost - I am not going to answer that question, but let me tell you one thing - it is not that low cost actually, it costs as a lot of money to provide such high quality link and that is the reason we charge the community members with such large amounts for the use our Internet Service :-) Believe me, I have been trying for the last 9 months to find the most cost effective solution and I know for sure, that the one that we provide features the lowest possible cost. And even now, if I could find a way to bringing the cost further down, I would - somehow I am mesmerised with the figure of R99 pm...
 
SrcRR is not not likely to scale to more than a few hundred nodes in its current form. It could be optimized for the common case in which nodes mostly communicate with the nearest wired gateway, since then routing traffic could be limited to gateways periodically flooding unsolicited queries.

Roofnet would quickly run out of radio capacity if a growing number of users shared a fixed set of wired gateways. We hope that a roughly constant fraction of users will volunteer to share their DSL lines, which will keep most Roofnet traffic relatively local even as the network expands.
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I was looking at killing this thread but it's actually a whopper :)

You do know about the regulations around VSAT in South Africa too right? You gotta get it from Telkom or Sentech, and I know what they charge for 2Mbps VSAT. ;)
 
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Xarion said:
look guys i dont know why we are bothering to give out our advice, all we are doing its helping him with stuff we've spent so many hours perfecting, we'll let wifi mesh do their commercial thing and we do ours there is no point in arguing ourselves blue in the face
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Xarion,

What are you talking about - so far I have not received a single advice or a help from you.

Advice that the noise floor is high - hello, everyone knows that!

Please be more generous and say something valuable.

Or provide me with a criticism that I can learn something from.

But not *that* stuff that has been coming from you so far.

Sheesh!
 
TheRoDent said:
I was looking at killing this thread but it's actually a whopper :)

You do know about the regulations around VSAT in South Africa too right? You gotta get it from Telkom or Sentech, and I know what they charge for 2Mbps VSAT. ;)
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Ok, now I am happy - more quality input here...

Roofnet is our bible and MIT is our Paradise! You did not need that much of a push to discover it, though.

Our meshes are never larger than 4 hops. In fact, most of them are at 3 hops. And we never scale above 100 nodes.

Yes, we are aware of all the regulations in the telecommunications space in SA. But you are wrong that we only must get it from Telkom or Sentech. Do you think IS is getting it from Telkom only?
 
Could you explain this little bit from your "join" page?

If you don't have an e-mail address, may we suggest that you get a free one from Google, our associate company. Otherwise, welcome to the club!
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In what way are you associated to google ? :) :) :)
 
Well, he's not a VAN's licensee. For starters. That much is pretty clear. Working through the rest of the website, and avoiding the Wikipedia quotes, it's quite clear that there is quite a bit of "overrepresentation" happening here. And this was with hardly any digging.

Keep in mind that many of the people here are professionals, in the industry, and clearly know a lot more about what's going on than you do. I'd recommend that you keep that in mind whilst defending your clearly poor position.
 
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ath0 said:
Just answer my questions?

You are surely doing a great job of bridging the digital divide, by NOT deploying in previously disadvantaged areas, and by selling equipment for 3-4 times more than their normal price?
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ath0,

I said that before to others, but let me repeat it to you - your viciousness is uncalled for.

If you have visited the site www.wifi-mesh.co.za, you would have read about our intentions to cover most urban and semi-urban areas in the most populated cities in SA, which include the most informal settlements.

To achieve that, we have developed a special solar powered node that is robust enough to be deployed in such areas (spare me the thought of children throwing stones at the panels or their dads stealing the panels so they can power their portable TVs).

As for the price of our supplementary APs - you cannot possibly know how much they cost us - so don’t assume, as it makes "ass of you and me"
 
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