Wireless in Dunedin

Since Synaptic/Scarfies came and went, anyone know if anythings operating down this way?

I've registered www.dunedinwireless.net.nz and intend on offering community based wifi(as in to those that can't afford Telecoms DSL plans, but who knows, if it's wanted by a few, maybe it will be commercially viable to do proper plans these days?



Site should go live in the next zone build.

Dave.

what Firmeware are you using on the WRT54GL routers

Freifunk
German OpenWRT fork using OLSR
Freifunk Firmware (English) - freifunk.net

Not strictly using the GL, Have three older WRT54G v2.0 but same firmware on all...

Just testing at the moment though, but getting pretty good coverage in the tests... my folks have farm land in the area, and I was ~1km line of site from my house, and still getting good signal with the USB wifi in my laptop the other night.

Was probably a bit odd looking, out in the rain, at night, on a farm bike, laptop in hand, waving a cooking dish in the air.

It's not perfect, but it's not intended to be, just good enough for those who can't normally get this sort of thing.

Have had a bit of interest to my personal email(dw not working yet, waiting on new server, one less thing to transfer) from geeks in the area, odd really, as this is the only place I mentioned it, and this place isn't overly rageing with visitors.

Oh yeah, in the interests of full disclosure, I am mates with Dan Clark(ex-scarfies/synaptic), and did do some non-paid for support work for them, other than that, no links to anyone except my wife

Just an update... it's good, but it's not what I would call great.
It has major issues with jumping more than about 5 hops, and it doesn't appear to be a routing issue, as traffic does get there, it's just slow like molasses on a cold wintery night when it's snowing... ok, well anyway, it's slow.

Looking at getting borg boxes although configured differently as I would think that they too would suffer from the same thing due to limits with wireless(single or dual radio), although three would get around it(two dedicated to backbone type closed bridge, third for clients to connect to in AP mode), so I'll give a go at routing around the problem...

have you tried DD-WRT on the linksys router
http://www.dd-wrt.com this package gets some good raves

yeah have done, it seems to suffer from the same thing after you get ~4-5-6 links down the chain. like I said, it appears to be a stacking of the half-duplex-ness of the current wifi gear.

Have been able to minimise it by using mimo stuff as the bridge between the nodes effectively giving me ~108Mbps(so the marketing says) between the nodes and net connection, and "only" 11/54Mbps to the clients depending on what they are using.

do you neccesarily need to use a different firmware on the WRT54GL routers to get the most out of them? eg the DD-WRT or the OpenWRT firmware? just wanting to find out before putting my 54GL up on the roof

will be using them with omni mount antennaes, to setup an easily connectable wifi setup here in my town.,

Hi there, you don't really need to, but the alternative firmwares offer much more if you have a need for more.

If the default firmware gives you all you need, use it.

My reasoning for using alternative firmware were varied, in the end I have settled on DD-WRT(paid for version 20 euros, gotta support the dev team) because it gives me what I require(extended QOS).

What is "DD-WRT"? - WRT Wiki
DD-WRT SHOP

Personally, if I were setting up what you have mentioned above, the default is probably the easiest... although it's not exactly hard to download a different firmware and tftp it up.

good luck.

This link may be of use.
Linksysinfo - 3rd Party Firmware Comparison: WRT54G/GS
It's a comparison of the different firmwares availible

Dave have you had a look at [ O L S R . O R G ] seems to use a different method of suppling data to the routers

Have indeed... the freefunk(spelling is bad) firmware uses it... it is fine for ~6 hops, then it hits the same problem.

lol