mtl3p

I received a great email from Casey Halverson on the PTP mailing list. It was his response to someone’s question about how to startup a wifi group in his area. This is great timing since I’ve been trying to be helpful to a few people in Toronto and BC in getting projects started.

It’s so good that it reminds me of that fake graduation speech set to music. When I read it, I hear and old man stroking his beard and talking about the wifi-hijinks he used to be up to when he was young. Thanks Casey!

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> but, I think you hit the nail on
> the head when you mentioned having a few core people
> incolved. Half a dozen excited, tech-abled people would be
> more effective in the beginning than 50 people who are “just
> interested.”

Go to a SeattleWireless “General Meeting”, and you’ll see exactly why this is the case.

Nearly all of the core SeattleWireless p2p network and other ventures were a direct product of something we call HackNight. While a couple people from time to time show up to ask questions, this is generally the night of core SWN people to actually accomplish something. HackNight over the last year has accomplished more than all other SeattleWireless years combined. Its amazing what a small, dedicated core group can do.

I would suggest building as large of a network you possibly can, documenting your cause on the internet, meeting regularly in a coffee shop/meeting space with core members, and financing this one on your own. Don’t waste too much time marketing vapor and advertising. While a lot of groups (including SWN) uses these techniques to gain this long sought after “critical mass”, ultimately it was a waste of time.

In the beginning, nobody had line of sight to one another. That’s why you have to find high places to put antennas. This should not be a holding point, never say “well, as soon as we find someone line of sight, we’ll do it…”.

Be careful who you give gear to and the arrangements you make. You never know if they will quickly lose interest, don’t truly have the authority to offer collocation or it may even come back to haunt you (seattlewireless.com). Some people may have great locations, great line-of-sight, but make your moves wisely.

Finding the best/highest sites will not be easy. Its non-technical and more political. You will need to make good friends and find people sympathetic to your cause to gain free roof space. After that, your financing and technical skills will follow. And if you ever need any help, there are a billion other community networks that will answer your questions.

There is no one magic technology. Don’t ever wait for the next, greatest technology around the corner that will save your network. When it comes, it won’t save your network. The technology today is good enough.

You will need to dedicate lots of time to your project, at 4-6 hours a week. Make use of weekends to gather people for installs…during install campaigns, it will eat your weekends too.

I don’t ever regret venturing into this madness. Its interesting, and you learn a little bit on your way. I could care less about “freeing the internet from corporate America$#@#”, “OPEN SOURCE AND DOWN WITH MICROSOFT”, or “down with the phone company/man/etc/whatever”. I do it for the thrill and technical aspect.

I hate being long winded on mailing lists, but if I was any help to you, feel free to ask more.

- Casey Halverson
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UPDATE March 12, 2005: Casey blogged his advice.

And then, back at the downtown campus, I ran into Peter Francis war-walking around, triangulating rogue wifi networks using his dell pda. Peter works for IITS at Concordia. I had met him earlier this year and he had been impressed by the Ile Sans Fil website. Then I didn’t know that he was the guy to see regarding Concordia wireless. He told me that they are working on extending coverage to the rest of the downtown campus, including the offices, mainly because they are going to roll out TCP/IP mobile phones very soon. He also mentioned that they don’t use repeaters; all of the access points are connected by cable.

We talked a bit about the Mesh project. He seemed interested, but identified the difficulties quickly. I told him that I would contact him when we had a concrete proposal. He was also pretty interested when I told him that Dave and I had already made some Cantennas. As soon as Bruce fixes mine, I’ll show him. It would make triangulating those access points a lot easier.

So, MAN’s (metropolitan area network) are obviously examples of network economy (duh!). That means that they are hard to start up. In the effort to jumpstart a Montreal MAN I am wondering whether IleSansFil could think about changing it’s mission to include the MAN project. Secondly, I thought the best idea to really get things going would be to to get Concordia, McGill, and UQAM as nodes - with directional links between them and omni’s at each site to connect local nodes. I know it’s far-fetched, but I got the idea because there is a Concordia ham radio club that has access to the roof and multiple antennas. If they can do it, another club might. Anyways, I’ll email the ISF mailing list and see what the other vols think and I’m going to go see CSUS tomorrow and see about starting a club. We wanted to start wireless groups at each of the universities anyways to get the CompSci and Engineers involved in ISF.

BTW I’m a volunteer at ISF and a ConU part-time student.