Benefits of Mesh Wifi over Conventional Wifi

Post date: May 21, 2009 7:37:14 PM

About 1 1/2 years ago, AT&T had to pull the plug on a municipal wifi project they were planning for St. Louis City. More Info:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21202

AT&T's big problem was how to get power to the wifi transceivers they wanted to hang on streetlight poles throughout the city, since those poles only receive power at night, when the lights are on. In comparison, WasabiNet avoids this sort of problem in the following ways...

• Scale. AT&T was planning a single wireless network to span the entire city, and consequently they ran into unanticipated problems, like the streetlight power, because their scale was too big. Mesh wifi nets like WasabiNet are neighborhood-sized, not city-sized, so these kind problems will be much smaller, if not non-existent.
• Low Power. AT&T's transceivers were relatively high-power devices (10-20Watts per antenna, maybe 100W per antenna array) that would require substantial juice to achieve their intended coverage area. This is another factor that made the streetlight problem a show-stopper for AT&T. The mesh transceivers used by WasabiNet, by comparison, draw less than 5Watts each, and indeed they can even be run entirely off batteries and solar power!
• Open Source. AT&T's municipal wifi net would have used 100% closed-source software. The software running on all WasabiNet routers, ROBIN and OLSR in particular, are Open Source projects that were developed collaboratively by hundreds of software engineers from all over the world. This software is intentionally provided free of charge, as that permits local projects like WasabiNet to spring up and ultimately bring everyone a larger return on their investment than otherwise possible with close-source software development.
• Cost of Operation. WasabiNet is intended to be a simple and low-cost approach to wireless internet access. The routers themselves are cheap (approx $50/ea) and self-configuring. The WasabiNet co-op business model does not require maximizing profits or hiring full-time staff. Finally, the captive portal with ads from local businesses generates neighborhood-scale commerce, that even further offsets the already-low operating costs for WasabiNet.