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!

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.

It's time to gather forces and talk about how to get Vancouver covered in wireless connectivity -- let's meet this Thursday.

Join us to discuss strategies for getting more wireless networks deployed from the ground up. Joe Bowser is working on DogOnRails, a re-write of the venerable WifiDog software, and several other attendees have experience with Meraki wireless gear.

Ideally, we will join force with Free Geek Vancouver and work towards grass roots community wireless coverage of the city.

Here's what Joe Bowser has to share with us:

1. Nitobi will have a unit installed. If we can get the signal out to
   Workspace, that'd help get the network up and going.
2. DogOnRails is deployed, but I haven't tested the latest version.
   It's not really related to mesh directly, but it can be used as a
   captive portal.
3. I bought two WGT634Us to test MIT Roofnet and see how easy it is to
   get it working, and it's fairly simple. With some dev work, we can get
   an Open Meraki firmware (one that doesn't phone home, or use Dashboard),
   which is definitely worth talking about.

This is very much a quick kick off meeting to get the ball rolling. Please come out and share your thoughts and ideas.

5:30pm this Thursday, Sept. 13th, at the Bryght offices. On Upcoming and on Facebook.

Photo by Ariane Whew. /me lets out big breath. As always, this year's BarCamp Vancouver event was absolutely fantastic. Ideas, social media, intense thinking, tossing around concepts, learning from everyone, lots of fun, beer, eats, etc. etc. Feedback and thoughts in no particular order.

So, in recent discussions with folks like Darren Barefoot as well as David Vogt of Mobile Muse (and, of course, kicking the idea around the Bryght offices), it's become clear that community wireless in Vancouver is something that really should happen. We've got the Olympics in 2010 staring us in the face, and it seems like that's a good deadline to try and accomplish a variety of innovative things.

BC Wireless has been around for quite some time, but hasn't really crossed over from the geek side. Actually, I need to give it some more time. I reactivated the wiki account I have there and spent some time looking at the various projects going on. The "to do" of analyzing  the various hardware access points that are available looks promising.

While involvement from the various Vancouver municipalities would be ideal, there are other things that can happen from a grassroots perspective. This led me to start poking around some of the technology pieces.

Both FON and Meraki look interesting. Anyone have pointers to similar, off-the-shelf inexpensive wireless access points? Mesh solutions

FON is closely related to voice / VoIP "stuff" and has a compact router for $30US including shipping. That's cheap enough to pick up a couple just to mess around with. Oops! Except their store only lists the US under North America...The discussion of "what is FON" which describes the range of sharing to pay users is a good place to start. If there is interest (leave a comment) I'll try and get a contact with FON about doing a bulk / special order to Canada. Or at least, Vancouver for starters.

Meraki has had some investment from Google and is currently in beta for both pricing and the service. The hardware units are tied to a back end management system for which they also charge for. I sent an email asking about the beta program and got a price list. The nice thing is that they also have ruggedized outdoor units as opposed to the cheap indoor FON units. As well, they are a mesh solution, so can seamlessly cover wide areas.

I sent a follow up email essentially asking "Why Meraki?"...I guess I'm leery of getting locked into a backend management system that charges fees. FON of course has a system as well, but doesn't charge end users directly.

I'll leave it up to Darren to post a poll / survey asking if you would share your home and/or business data connection in order to help blanket Vancouver in wireless...

Other interesting community wireless projects in Canada include Wireless Toronto and île Sans Fil (Montreal).