So imagine my surprise when, in today’s New York Times, I read about the Police Wireless system that was just installed in the NYC subways. It doesn’t work—in fact, they’ve known that it wouldn’t work since 2001, but they built it anyway. And the pricetag? $140,000,000 already spent, with another $60,000,000 needed before it’ll be operational. Think about this a moment, $20,000,000 to wireless the city, $200,000,000 to wireless the subway for police use.

Sascha writes about how mesh wireless technology would have been a much better idea, along with open standards to ensure interoperability.

I wrote about how mesh could be used to help build real broadband deployments in NYC over 1.5 years ago:

Here again, mesh networks can play multiple roles. Nodes can disburse wireless internet backhaul from the city’s dark fiber and existing excess bandwidth via a mesh network mounted on lamp posts. That network can feed separate mesh networks that draw the internet up into and throughout a building like a tree drinks water. And people and businesses can move their lives and their livelihoods from building to building without causing network disturbances.

With the help of mesh networks, New York can become a living, organic city, whose lifeblood is the packets of information that flows freely from point to point, person to person, bouncing around automatically finding its way to and from the internet.

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University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign partners with CUWiN to build high-performance, robust open source wireless mesh networking technologies.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $500,000 in grant funding to support a research and development partnership between the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This initiative, “Toward building a Performance-Predictable Wireless Mesh Network”, focuses on the development of wireless routing protocols, network testing systems, and gateway discovery in open-source technology. The grant, part of the Network Technology and Systems Program of the NSF, provides support over a three-year period.

“CUWiN is building the next generation of mesh wireless technologies. Most importantly, CUWiN is releasing our software under an open source license—allowing communities, municipalities, organizations, and individuals around the world to deploy low-cost alternatives to current proprietary systems.” stated Sascha Meinrath, CUWiN Executive Director.

Community and municipal wireless networks have gained tremendous attention in recent years. The ultimate objective of this CUWiN/UIUC partnership is to incorporate research results and system prototypes into production code to be widely distributed by CUWiN. With the help of CUWiN, the research to be carried out by UIUC researchers will make a real impact and effect high-throughput, cost-effective broadband access both for the U.S. and worldwide.

“I am extremely pleased with the fact that NSF recognizes the importance of carrying out research on a real multi-hop wireless network. CUWiN provides us with a city-wide research testbed to understand how, and to what extent, wireless links are affected by PHY/MAC attributes and other environmental factors. All the measurements we make on CUWiN will help characterize the behavior of wireless links and identify control ‘knobs’ in the MAC/PHY layers with which the network capacity can be optimized.” Principal Investigator, Jennifer Hou, stated.

CUWiN’s mission is to help bridge the digital divide by developing low-cost, open source, wireless technologies and making them available to community and municipal networks around the world. CUWiN networks have been established in urban settings like Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., as well as rural places like the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation near San Diego, California, and Apirede, Ghana. CUWiN continues to expand its development testbed in Urbana, Illinois in partnership with the City of Urbana and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

“The wireless technologies being developed by CUWiN as a part of this initiative hearken back to the innovation and vibrancy of early Internet development.” stated Ross Musselman, CUWiN Outreach Coordinator. “With a focus on maintaining Internet freedom, these new technologies support digital inclusion around the globe.”

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Jim Akens, who’s a Senior Engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts recently contacted NYCwireless to let us know about how his research institution is using Pebble Linux to set up an off-shore wireless network to enable real-time data reconnaissance.

SWAP stands for “Ship-to-Ship/Ship-to-Shore Wireless Access Protocol”.

SWAP is a collaborative project to provide wireless networking between ships within the UNOLS research fleet and between those ships and UNOLS port facilities. SWAP has been designed to also facilitate connections with instrumented buoys.

The active administrators consist of a few volunteer engineers from varying institutions who have collaborated over several months to argue about the details and make it all work.

The goal of our labor has been to provide voluntary hardware recommendations and software configurations to meet the requirements set forth by the UNOLS Technical Enhancement Committee RVTEC. These requirements were summed up in a series of “StoryScenarios”.

To meet that goal we have provided a parts list complete with vendor information where the items can be purchased, elaborate instructions regarding construction of the devices and their installation, preconfigured operating system distributions that can be freely downloaded and detailed instructions regarding how to install the software and complete the configuration for your situation. And of course, we are happy to come and do this all for you.

To necessitate interoperability, we also provide an administrative role, doling out network addresses, hostnames and other details to participants.

This is a great use of wireless technology, and a great example of why NYCwireless develops and provides open source technology and information to help enable new uses for this technology.

You can find out more information about the Woods Hole wireless network here and here. They’ve even got some great maps of the mesh network they’ve created:

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The ”$100 Laptop that the MIT Media Lab:1 has been working on has gotten some press lately, and for good reason. I was at the Lab for a reunion gathering a few weeks ago, and Nicholas Negroponte talked about the $100 Laptop as more of a vehicle for social change, as opposed to just another piece of hardware. It is cheap and functional, and it will enable entire countries to equip all of their children with an educational tool.

Most importantly, it will act as a vehicle for an entire country’s youth generation to gain a voice that is independent of the government and independent of the established power structures. Its action as a social tool comes almost entirely from the inclusion of mesh wireless technology into the Laptop, so that each child can communicate with every other child using peer-to-peer wireless connections. Imagine the early American Pony Express, where letters were handed from person to person in order to travel across the country.

Nicholas is appropriately concentrating on third world countries with the $100 Laptop. But as a vehicle for social change, the Laptop, with mesh wireless, stands to be a powerful force in the US and other first world countries as well, and not just for kids. Right now—and if you’ve read this blog, you know about this already—all communications technologies in the US necessarily get filtered through large Telco/Cable/Media companies. SBC plus AT&T and Verizon plus Sprint control a majority of this country’s communications pipes, and as I’ve spoken about in the past, are increasingly seeking ways to control the content and conversations that take place over “their” networks.

This is bad for everyone. A reliance on asymmetrical communication services (cable-modems, DSL) chokes off our voices, and our country becomes more and more influenced by fewer and fewer people who care less and less about us, the public.

What can we do? The mesh networking built into Nicholas’ $100 Laptop enables communication from person to person, without any need to interact with the Telco companies that want to stifle real conversation. If everyone in the US had a $100 Laptop with mesh networking, there would truly be conversation “For the People, By the People”.

This is the real power of a transformative technology, one that can effect change in both First and Third World countries.

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We can assume that market forces as well as smart business will eventually cause these vendors and others to come to an agreement on mesh networking protocols and architecture. There’s also work being done by the IEEE 802.11 standards body to a create 802.11s mesh networking standard. And of course, it would make sense for clients—businesses and expecially municipal governments—to push these vendors to standardize their products to ensure that there’s no vendor lock in. This is particularly important for governments, and should be a criteria for any muni-wireless RFP.

Mobile Pipeline neglects to discuss the open source projects that provide well developed mesh technology. CUWiN, Freifunk, and LocustWorld integrate mesh technologies—CUWiN using Hazy Sighted Link State, Freifunk using Optimized Link State Routing, and LocustWorld using Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector. In both of these cases these mesh networks use published, open standards for meshing.

I know I’m leaving out a number of other open source or open standard mesh networking projects. Please let me know what else should be included here.

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