I made the “executive” decision to start calling each device a Community Router. Alternatively you could say Community HotSpot or Community Node, just throw Community in there because that’s what it’s all about

Whether you want to help out at home or work you can order a community router on our website for $60. We’ll send you a box in the mail with instructions and everything you need to get started.

Tell your friends and let’s get Edmonton connected!

The biggest problem has been getting everything deployed at once. It’s easy to get confused which node is where and what MAC address is what when you’re not taking notes and you’re adding a new repeater every hour or so. Next year we’ll be able to tackle something like this quite early and actually get a nice partnership with whichever event we’re supporting.

Here’s a screenshot of the properly working Fringe grounds:

Oh, and the best thing we’re learning is PATIENCE. It’s very easy to get frustrated because a certain node isn’t checking in fast enough or there’s a flutter with some power or whatnot. Just give it an hour and it’ll return to normal, no use running down to the grounds if you don’t need to.

Come check out and enjoy the Free WiFi at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival courtesy of the Free WiFi Project!

Not so simple.

The Fringe Festival is pretty tied up in sponsorship commitments and our group approached them relatively late in the game. So being officially supported isn’t in the cards. Don’t get me wrong, the powers that be are encouraging and wish they could help us out, but it’ll be next year if anything. Also, the businesses in the area either don’t have an Internet connection, or are too far away. Or, if you’re a business with many partners you can’t make a decision to share your Internet connection without talking to all 7 or them. I’ve found that the less understanding about the Internet and technology people have the more they have to validate a request with everyone they know. Not so surprising after all.

So what was our solution? Why WiMax of course Having friends in the countryside I had used a Rogers Portable Internet solution before, with reasonable results. It’s not the fastest thing on the planet but with good reception you can comfortably browse the web and check your email. The problem was aquiring one of these devices.

Yesterday I went to THREE Digital Communications stores here in Edmonton. I’ll never go back. The first place I visited had the only person knowledgeable about the product out walking about the mall. Coming back later I find that their computer system is down and he can’t access the company intranet to actually sell me the device. Oh, and this manager tells me the device is a piece of crap to boot. Thanks but I’ve used it.

So I mosey on over to their head office where they should have some of these devices. “There’s NONE in Edmonton” were the first words out of the bosses mouth. Great. I make her check her computer anyway and low and behold there’s one in a kiosk in the same mall I was just at. Oh, and she also tells me it’s a piece of crap. Smrt.

Back at the mall I talk to this guy at the kiosk. Nice enough guy and he’s trying to sell it to us. Although he starts off by telling me it’s not very good and he doesn’t even try to sell it to anyone else because they all come back. That’s funny, if they all came back there wouldn’t be a shortage… Anyway I insist on buying the piece of crap and once again their system won’t sell it. This is four hours later, good job Rogers.

Fed up with Rogers (Digital Communications) I head to a Bell store the next morning. The guy sells me it without a hitch and I get two months free with 15 days to bring it back. Better deal than Rogers would have given me. Plus this guy was nice and didn’t downplay the product at all. Go Bell.

Other than activation, this thing is a no-brainer. I had to call in to activate and that took all of five minutes. After that you just plug in an ethernet cable and away you go. I slapped a switch into the box and a mesh router into that and boom, I now have wireless Internet wherever I’ve got a power cable. The modem has 5 lights on the top that indicate signal strength and it’s a matter of just turning it a little to get the best signal.

A nice business on the edge of the Fringe grounds, named Grateful Threads (go check them out, they deserve my plug) was gracious enough to let us put the setup in their window. In fact they were quite eager to help out from the very beginning. I slapped on a 7dBi omni-directional antenna that confero24.com sent me to test and away we went. Fairly decent range, all the way across the park, and the speed isn’t too shabby.

Back at homebase (my cafe) I prepped some more routers to be deployed as repeaters. Unfortunately we only got two out today, as Mack’s followers on Twitter pointed out. We’ll deploy some more tomorrow and hopefully get a bit more coverage.

All in all I’m fairly satisfied with the Bell hotspot. If it works out we’ll probably keep it around for various events around town. I’m stoked!

If you want to get involved or if you have a business in desperate need of some free community wifi give us a shout over at http://free-wifi.ca/contactus.php.

An article was published in today’s Journal about the Free WiFi project I started.

An Old Strathcona cafe owner hopes to blanket the area and eventually much of the city with what’s apparently Edmonton’s first free wireless Internet network created by a private group.

Eric Warnke of Free WiFi says the group has set up at least seven locations since June from which people can access the Internet with laptops, cellphones, new iPods and other equipment…

Read the whole thing

I certainly hope it’s a stop-gap before a better logo because this one looks like someone spent five minutes learning Photoshop while making it.

To Mike and anyone involved with Open-Mesh, I suggest you check out Worth1000. It’s an awesome site where you can get a really quality logo for only a couple hundred dollars.

Hi guys,

I thought I’d start sending out updates via email for now until I get the motivation to blog them. Eventually I’d like to have a wiki of sorts for community wifi projects and the like.

Anyhoo:

• I’ve got Second Cup on 104th up and running.

• I switched the domain to http://free-wifi.ca and I redesigned the site to allow for better ads. Any ads you see are fake. Don, wanna give me $75/month!?

• I also turned on the captive portal which makes users authenticate their session before they can continue. I did this because it forces a redirect to free-wifi.ca while the previous redirect option wasn’t always working.

• The last updates from firmware version 952 to 953 bricked most of the network until I could reset them, however from 953 to 955 they were fine. This is good because 953 and 955 were supposed to address a lot of hangup issues the nodes have. I hope manual resets aren’t going to be the demise of the project.

• I spoke to Jonathan Plesset in Pittsburgh on the phone last week. He’s a neat guy, sounds like he’s young and one of “us” He hates municipal wifi projects (sorry Don) and he runs a hotel down there and has 100+ nodes in the hotel and then 31 nodes on his street. It’s an area called Shady Side which is very similar to Whyte Avenue. Something like he has running is my short/long-term goal. Check out his site (http://www.shadysidewifi.com/) and then the Meraki (he hates them btw) map. http://public.meraki.com/network/shadysidewireless He runs like 50GB a WEEK through TWO gateways! Some of the nodes are 8 hopes away too. It’s crazy, I hope it’s something we can accomplish.

• Stephen has taken several nodes and placed them at ThinkTel and a few other locations. Mack, would you like some? I think you’d be the best person to go talk to the Three Bananas Cafe.

• I’ve been trying to bookmark whatever I find on free wifi or related material. You can see them here: http://del.icio.us/ewarnke/wireless

I would like to have a big pow wow for everyone interested or involved in this project. As most of you know I’ll be out of the country for 4 months come September and it’s too long to just drop this thing. I was hoping to do this in early August. Friday the 1st even. We could meet at my cafe depending on how large the group is, or heck Three Bananas would work (right Mack?). Anyone have suggestions or problems with August 1st?

If you know anyone who wants to be included in future updates please have them contact me.

If you have any questions or ideas please let me know.

Eric

And that’s that.

Open-Mesh.com is slowly but surely improving. Just recently I noticed their homepage changed slogans. It went from something like “WiFi for the developing world” to “WiFi Where You Need It”. I like the latter, myself.

New firmware updates have also happened and beta 1.21 has been released. There was a glitch upgrading to the c953 firmware because of the technique used to upgrade. This required a lot of people to manually reset their routers if they were using the test firmware. They fixed the problem by using the “normal” way to upgrade and version c955 went off without a hitch.

According to Antonio Anselmi, author of the ROBIN mesh network software which powers Open-Mesh, says that the latest kernel is about a week away. Yay!

At one point over 40 people were using the WiFi at the same time. The network saw a total of 71 users throughout the day.

I’m looking forward to the better firmware that Open-Mesh is developing on a daily basis. Eventually I’d like to see these things as simple as plug-and-play without having to worry about them checking in.

BarCampEdmonton1 is in 9.5 hours. I’ve stayed up later than usual quickly putting together a splash page for the WiFi network I’m setting up. This will let me track all the traffic it receives over the course of the day.

I reflashed and updated 5 of my Open-Mesh routers this evening. I’m hoping that’s enough but I have at least 10 I can break out if I have to.

I’m hoping to do a session at BCE1 on mesh networks and the current state of technology surrounding them. I seriously haven’t planned anything yet so I’m going to gather my thoughts a bit before I hit the hay.

The city’s IT Director, Steven Gordon did most of the talking. According to their surveys, people expect the service to be there. The public system is based upon the existing city employee network, the public section just builds on top of it. This means that for incremental costs a public access point can be placed anywhere the city has infrastructure. Steven thinks that piggy-backing on the city wifi is the best option to keep costs low.

They mentioned how some other cities have tried municipal wifi as well. Apparently Philadelphia ran their own city wifi project that ran around $3 million, however they have partnered with another company. I’m 100% sure on this though. Councilor Don Iveson mentioned that some transit corridors in Seattle allow wifi access, like in the back of busses. Calgary also had a city wifi project that ultimately failed.

There are some major problems with Edmonton’s current public wifi:

• E-mail is blocked
• Traffic is filtered
• Filtering drives a lot of the expenses
• It’s insanely expensive to set up a hotspot (like roughly $20,000 expensive)

Councilor Ben Henderson brought up the filtering problem and he strongly encourages the notion that we open it up. Based on his past experiences traveling and using our own wifi he’s had frustrating experiences when he couldn’t access his email.

Councilor Karen Leibovici doesn’t think this project is self sufficient and it won’t make any money. She posed the question of why we should spend this money on public wifi when the private sector is already competing. Even without my bias I agree (yes, quite the statement, I know ). I’m of the opinion that the government shouldn’t try to compete with the private sector, unless it’s in an out of control industry that needs regulation.

Gordon feels that “we’ve struck the right balance,” but he did agree to create a business case outlining a cost benefit analysis as councilor Linda Sloan requested. This was seconded by Ron Hayter who would also like to see a numbers break down and the implications involved.

So the council moved to continue the exploration of free wifi. I believe that if they are able to bring the costs down to a reasonable level they might have a chance. Hopefully our taxes aren’t going to be wasted on super secure and expensive wifi hotspots. Many people see open free wifi as a utility and they believe it will give Edmonton some credibility as a world class place for travellers, business, and young people alike.