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Post date: May 28, 2009 10:21:30 PM
A WiFi Co-Op Called WasabiNet Blooms On Cherokee Street
In January 2007, Mayor Francis Slay announced via blog post that he had hashed out a deal with AT&T to outfit the entire city of St. Louis with low cost wireless Internet. But the agreement, worth an estimated $30 million, fell apart once word spread that the city had failed to seek bids from other companies -- and questions arose about how AT&T would power its WiFi antennas.
Now, two and a half years later, a handful of citizens and business owners in St. Louis' Cherokee Street neighborhood have set up their own public WiFi network using grant money, ingenuity, and a stretched-out DSL signal from none other than AT&T.
The service is called WasabiNet and it is billed as a publicly owned and maintained "wireless Internet co-operative."
It's powered by a series of inexpensive DSL routers that beam a WiFi signal around the neighborhood using nifty technology called a "mesh node network." It currently boasts download speeds of up to three megabytes per second.
It costs about $10 a month to join and it is set to jump2 in size from six subscribers to about 30 in the coming weeks. Coverage spans from Minnesota to California Avenues, but the network's creator, Ben West, hopes it will eventually extend from Compton to Jefferson Avenues and accommodate up to 300 people.
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