[wsfii-discuss] fon/meraki/community meshes differanciated .. (was: Re: Fwd: [india-gii] wireless connectivity.. Is802.11n the end of ethernet?)

[roland]

Thanks for the differenciation.
I do understand you can buy FON or Meraki equipments and plug it on any available internet connection and extend your coverage.
Roland

kloschi <kloschi at subsignal.org> wrote: Me again, 

On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 00:24 -0700, roland wrote:
>  said:
> > it's totally different , FON is selling people bandwidth

FON is not selling bandwidth at all.

It "delivers" just a re-selling infrastructure, using wireless
technology. Therefore they claim to do a "community" project, which is
imho not true.

> If that's the case does that mean you cannot buy FON equipment and
> plug it to your own Connection without using their bandwidth?

You can. 

> I think FON and Meraki are doing a great job. they are providing
> facilities to extend a commercial or non-commercial hotspot or
> wireless mesh using what ever bandwidth you have. 

Please don't mix it up, FON is by no means a mesh, it is a hotspot
network. Based on a commercial idea. Not delivering any freedom of
communication, no direct networking between participants (which real
meshes do).

I am so far not convinced about Meraki's projects, but its a matter of
time to see what they do, how they succeed and the goals they reach and
also might fail .. :) 
The hardware is great, the software needs testing imho. So spoken, it is
also possible to replace either the fonera's or the meraki's firmware
with a free community mesh (!) enabled firmware (like openwrt [1] or
more specialised in that field fff, the freifunk firmware [2]).

So there is two sides of a medal: 
one) having a company, claiming to do community projects, with some
business model behind. they mostly don't do mesh, but just re-selling
somehow, or enabling people to resell. this approach is good, because it
raises connectivity in general and is "central organized". 
it is bad, because it is not people based, no interaction between
participants, fixed configrations and therefor less freedom for people
participating in the "project". in the end there is no such thing as a
community, further than discussion forums about technical or logistical
issues with the own access point.

two) having a community of people, with certain goals. usually the
network is mesh based, people based, and therefor internally networked.
this approach is good because it empowers participants (technologically
as well as being 'neticens'), there is a real networkbuilt, not just a
number of non-associated hotspots, which gives a certain degree of
stability and possible fallbacks. this approach might lack
organizational qualities, which mainly depends on the articipants. the
possibly non-existing centralised organisation or otherwise the
possibility of centralising it a sometimes heated discussion in those
kind of projects, and leads to the question of how people in democratic
societies want to organize in civil society projects and therefor is
neither a pro or a con.



Kind regards,
kloschi

[1] http://openwrt.org
[2] http://freifunk.net
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Roland Mfondoum 
SOLI APT 403 GIRNE 
MERSIN 10 TURKEY 
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