Soliciting Fame

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

A few days ago my shipment of Open-Mesh routers arrived! They’re super small and really cool.

Here are a bunch of pictures of me opening them.

The setup was really simple, just like the Meraki routers. Basically you need to plug in on of the repeaters to an internet and power connection for 5 minutes so it updates and then the WLAN lights will start flashing, this means it’s ready to rock. Then you just log in to Open-Mesh.com and add the router’s MAC or IP address to the network and BOOM, it’s broadcasting.

To expand the network you just add more routers and place them around. A repeater doesn’t have an internet cable connection, it just picks up the closest wireless signal from the same network and rebroadcasts it. A gateway has an internet connection and therefore a stronger signal.

Right now I have one router sitting in the window at my cafe. I’ll make another post soon to explain why

For as long as I’ve had my cafe I’ve offered free wireless access to anyone who comes in. The idea is simple, if you’re here you’re probably going to eat or drink something while using the wifi. If you aren’t, then at least you’re putting a body in my window for other people to see.

Until recently my router only went a few feet past my building. It doesn’t help that I’m in an old cinder block building and the router was at the back. When I was still working for Nexopia I had schemed with a few of the engineers there about bouncing free wifi down Whyte Avenue using different repeaters. We came up with some grand schemes but nothing materialized mostly due to the time and cost restraints we all had.

Traditional wifi networks require the customization of each router, known as a node or repeater. I bought a Linksys WRT54GS router with plans for re-flashing the device with my own firmware. However after a lot of research I realized I didn’t have the technical expertise to do that. I could teach myself but it would take me a long time to become familiar enough with Linux to properly implement the router.

A while went by and I just kept offering free wifi to my customers in the cafe. Then along came Edmonton’s NextGen focus group on municipal wifi. Before I attended I once again opened up my research for free wireless networks and I stumbled across a company named Meraki and the idea of an open-mesh wifi network. I decided to order one of the Meraki Outdoor Pro repeaters.

I went to the municipal wifi focus group and we talked mostly about where to recommend the city implements free wifi. I was a bit turned off by the idea of leaving it up to the city’s IT department to make recommendations on how to implement this sort of system. If it’s anything like the U of A, it will be ancient, expensive, and unreasonably secure. I let everyone know I had already been considering this and I would be going ahead with my own experiment. This was met with a lot of encouragement because it’s exactly what the city needs to see in order to get something done. Perfect.

The idea behind a mesh network is that one plugs in a gateway node to a hard line to the internet. This node starts broadcasting a wifi signal. Any additional nodes that are given power within range pick up this signal and start repeating it. This is all automatic without any setup. You can only repeat a signal so far before the quality degrades, so every once in a while you’ll need to add another hard line. With enough nodes you can blanket whatever size area you want.

Meraki is a great concept… but with faults. They create neat looking wireless repeaters that have all the firmware pre-installed out of the box. Unpacking and plugging in my router was as simple as that, unpacking it and plugging it in. Then I logged on to their management page and put in my order number and it automatically connected to my device.

Meraki has one of the slickest dashboards I’ve seen for anything hardware related. It lets you map where your nodes and are track who is using it. As well you can introduce payment structures for people accessing your wifi if you’re greedy enough to do it.

Where Meraki fails is in letting their customers customize the product. Initially you were able to hack the devices however you want until Meraki decided to remotely update each device’s firmware and change their EULA. Read more here: http://www.virishi.net/from-happy-hacking-screw-you-story-meraki

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of creative control with the splash page for my router. The splash page is going to be how I justify deploying these nodes. If a few ads on a welcome screen can cover the cost of the hardware I’ll keep adding them. So far I’m going to sit on this one for a month and see what the usage is like.

Meraki pros:

• Simple to use
• Great tracking and management software
• Payment options
• Super easy to expand

Meraki cons:

• Expensive!
• Very little plash page customization
• Extremely vague on payment terms and what sort of cut they get
• Evil ad bar for regular versions
• Evil EULA that doesn’t let you modify their hardware

Since Tuesday afternoon there have been 42 unique users of the network, and only about 5 have been inside my cafe. The Meraki repeater is supposedly good for around 700ft., and I can get a connection well down the street in several coffee shops. Right now it’s suction cupped to one of my windows.

In the future I’ll be looking more into Open-Mesh.com, the open source wifi mesh project that is much cheaper and fully customizable.

This last week I spent a good portion of my free time deliberating over new designs for my business cards and flyers.

The biggest complaint my customers have had is finding the cafe! Visibility is pretty limited so I chose to include a map on both the business cards and the flyers. I originally had a Google map pasted in there but it wouldn’t scaled properly so I ended up tracing it with the pen tool in Illustrator. The Starbuck’s and Wee Book Inn logos are popular landmarks here on Whyte Ave. A friend suggested I should have added the Princess Theatre as well but unfortunately they aren’t organized enough to even have a website, nevermind a logo.

The green is a major change! The cards used to have a bright red text on them (against the better wishes of my designer friends). Months ago I painted one wall of the cafe green and I want to continue to white/wood/green colour scheme.

Another major change in both flyers and cards is the amount of information. I had previously thought a minimalist look was pretty snazzy, and while it might look neat it’s essentially useless to anyone who picks up the card. So I included a long list of service we have and I highlighted the two I felt people use the most: “download anything”, and “type your resume”.

Download anything

I pride myself on having the best and most unrestricted computers on Whyte Ave. Other cafes or libraries really crack down how well you can use the computer and what you can do. I let my customers install whatever they want and look at whatever they want. This means someone can download all the file sharing software or porn (yes porn) they wish.

On the topic of porn: a great deal of my regular customers like to use dating and otherwise “private” websites. I have a very strict “I don’t care” rule as long as nobody else is being bothered, including staff, and most people are pretty modest anyway. The set up in the cafe is great for this. The computers aren’t super secluded so it’s not just a bunch of creepy people sitting in the back of the room. Instead each monitor is separated by the box and a good deal of desk space. This provides some good respect for the individual while leaving the cafe friendly and open.

Type your resume

Most of my customers don’t own computers, hence their visiting an internet cafe. There are a fair number of younger patrons who stop by the type up or print off a resume. With the number of (assumed) low-income young people living around Whyte Avenue and in the university area I want to encourage the continued use of the cafe as a cheap place to come in and type up your resume.

Along the resume tangent I have been considering offering a resume “doctoring” service where a customer drops off a rough version of their resume and I can take a look at it and spruce things up for them. Any pricing suggestions are welcome.

All that is left with the re-branding is to change the website and ordering a new sandwich board.

Today my new signs arrived! After much shopping around I decided to order a sign from EdgeLitSigns.com a branch of Carmanah. They do all sorts of neat LED and solar panel stuff, check them out.

The signs ended up costing me exactly $1,267.72 including shipping from Calgary. They took about four weeks to make which I thought was long but I’m happy in the end. Apparently Carmanah has a $1000 minimum for any work they do, so I assume my signs would have been cheaper if not for that.

The edge lit LEDs are pretty unique and not as bright as neon, but that’s fine because it cost approximately 1/3 what I would have paid for a channel letter sign with neon inside. Plus you can see through these when they’re mounted.

Initially there was supposed to be one bank of LEDs but it wasn’t bright enough for the order had to be change, again no big deal.

Now I need to mount them higher up on the windows, I still haven’t decided how to do this yet.

More pictures:

Visibility has been a huge problem I’ve faced since purchasing the cafe. Being located on the second floor is a real drag even though the rent it cheaper. At night the place is very hard to recognize without some illuminated signs. Really I should have boughten these babies six months ago, they’re worth it.

Entrepreneur tip: If you ever start or buy a business make sure you analyze how visible you are to your target market. For me, half my market is people passing by on foot or car.