since1968.com: Mahabir Pun Nepal Wireless Interview

A nice interview with Mahabir Pun about his project to bring wireless networks to rural Nepal. This is a project that my colleague Sebastian has been somewhat involved in as a sort of online volunteer. It is also one of the projects that we are looking to visit on our wireless roadshow, if all works according to plan.

Mahabir has just accepted our invitation to join us at the upcoming wireless4development workshops to be held as part of the FreiFunk Summer Convention on Djursland (Rural Denmark) in September.

The Summer Convetion is a sort of European Community Wireless Summit, with a rocking program (well it will be, i promise) and a really great rural broadband project as hosts. We have been lucky enough to find funding (Thankyou Open Society Institute) to piggy back a workshop on wireless in the developing world onto this and have invited such notabilites as Onno Purbo, Dave Hughes and Mahabir as ell as a number of our Wireless Roadshow partners.

I’m so excited, things are really starting to move here. What with this project, the IDRC funded curriculum project I mentioned earlier, and a few projects I am working on with Taqctical Technology Collective, things are happening and happening fast these days.

After receiving his Master%u2019s Degree in Education at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Mahabir Pun returned to his native village, Nangi, and founded the Himanchal Education Foundation. Mr. Pun is currently at work establishing wireless networks in rural Nepal.

Muniwireless: IDRC funds project to teach Wi-Fi implementers in Africa Archives

If MuniWireless can report it, then so can I.
We, as part of a consortium consisting of a number of teams working with wireless in development, have just gotten IDRC funding for a joint wireless curriculum project.
The object of the project is to develop training materials and courseware under an open license. The goal is obviously to join forces with others in this area to produce the best possible material and to get it into the hands of trainers in the developing world. We’ll be working on this material for the next 6 months or so, and will be testing it on our wireless roadshow as well as at the, hopefully, kickass FreiFunk SunnerConvention in Rural Denmark in early september.

This funding marks the 3rd time in the past 8 months we have gotten funding for a project that we are involved in. The other 2 being the Wireless Roadshow and the Wireless 4 Development workshops at the above-mentioned SummerConvention.

After 2 years of trying this feels really exciting, as if we are on a roll….
The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has funded a proposal submitted by the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) to teach Wi-Fi implementers and programmers in Africa. CUWiN is working with the Association for Progressive Communications, Ecole Supérieure Multinationale des Télécommunications, and wire.less.dk, a Danish wireless consulting company on this project. They received US$225,000 for the period July 2004 to June 2006.

Wizard of OS: Free Networks

run command free networks – a reality check

It looks like I will be on the Free Netwroking panel at the very interesting Wizard of OSin Berlin in mid-June. Other speakers on the panel include Dewayne Hendricks, Armin Medosch , James Stevens and Juergen Neumann. All except Dewayne are people i know personally, while Dewayne is someone I know by reputation, and am really looking forward to meeting. It should be fun.

O’Reilly Network: Wireless Mesh Networking [Jan. 22, 2004]

Coming up to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego in February, Sebastian and I, have an article on the O’Reilly Network. We wrote a simple hands-on tutorial on installing and running a wireless mesh network on a linux laptop, based on the very simple user-space implementation from MITRE, called MobileMesh.

I actually thin the article came out very well, given the audience that it is targetted at. I have no idea how many Linux Laptop users would actually be interested in this, but the idea is really to show how simple it can be to get started with this sort of technology.

In any case, have a look at it. I’m sure that if it gets a lot of hits they might ask us to write an article some other time again

The subject of this article is mesh networks, another technology that is gradually maturing to a point where it cannot be ignored when considering various wireless networking technologies for deployment. While the first large-scale community mesh deployments are yet to be seen, existing lab-level implementations and feasibility tests have demonstrated enough advantages to motivate further experimenting.

When we do commercial WiFi installations in hotels, cafés, or community housing projects, one of the main issues is how to provide client equipment that has little or no setup hassle.

I mean, we are currently working on a WiFi setup for a business hotel/apartmetn chain here in Copenhagen. They want to offer free WiFi as an amenity, and have already setup a system that covers one of their sites in town. When a customer wants Internet access and she doesn’t have WiFi in their laptop (surprisingly often) they borrow a unit from the hotel reception. Currently they use USB adapters, that require the installation of a driver. Even if you ignore for a minute the small percentage of users that are non-windows, there are 4 or 5 possible windows versions out there each with a different way of installing drivers and setting up networking. With no skilled IT personnel at the front desk that can become a real issue for the hotel. And (a little surprisingly) the biggest problem seems to b the administration of the actual driver CDs. CD’s are so easy to forget in your laptops CD drive that it is an all to common occurence where the hotel lends out an adapter, and gets the adapter back minus the driver CD.

Luckily for us our friends at KooKu have an interesting solution to this problem which we’ll be testing with the aforementioned hotel/apartment chain. The Gemtek WL-299C is pretty much a standard Wireless (802.11b) ethernet adapter much like the Linksys WET11 or any number of other Ethernet adapters from various manufacturers. That means it plugs into the computer using the existing ethernet port, and acts as a bridge between the wired and the wireless networks. For any computer with an existing ethernet port set up, and running DHCP, this means wireless networking without installing additional drivers.

The main difference between most other ethernet adaptyers and the Gemtek unit is extremely simple and fairly subtle. The unit is powered through USB rather than through a separate power adapter, in other words you plug it into your usb port, and your ethernet port, and it requires no external power source and no drivers. A simple solution that solves a minor annoyance for sites that want to offer WiFi but don’t want the support nightmare of lending out (or renting out) pc-card or usb-based adapters.

For a description of the unit, here’s a pdf from Kooku: download (Edit: The link has been corrected 2003-01-13)

If you’re interested in purchasing this unit, or just want more information, let me know: e-mail

: TomsNetworking : News, reviews and how-tos for knowledgeable networkers.

2 of the best teips & review sites have joined forces. The excellent SmallNetBuilder and Tom’s Hardware Guide, have started Tom’s Networking.

This is bound to be one of the top destinations for reviews and tips on home networking equipment, including a lot of material on wireless stuff.

According to this story on Wi-Fi Networking News, Less Networks is a Austin, Texas based community wireless effort,.
It’s a volunteer-based company that develops simple solutions that let café owners give away wireless internet access, while providing a bit of control over spammers, abuse etc., i.e. simple free wireless with management.

They also provide volunteers to help café owners actually set up the networks.

This is a pretty cool idea, and the name Less Networks, is pretty close to our own wire.less.dk (or less.dk for short).

I like the idea of helping café owners provide free wireless, as a way to spread the gospel to the community. Let’s not underestimate the value of showcases that visualize how much cooler free networking is, when compared to commercial hotspot services.

keep it up guys

[via WiFi Networking News]

pulverInnovations

pulver.com, the company behind Free World Dialup, has announced it’s WiSIP phone. It’s essentially a Voice-over-WiFi phone, a cordless wonder that let’s you use the Free World Dialup services from any open wireless network. It’s based on the SIP standard and will let you interact with other SIP-based services, but comes preconfigured to pulver.com’s own service. Now add to that the ability to use it with a service that let’s you dial into ‘normal’ phoneloines (not possible with free world dialup), and this is a powerful tool for WiFi power users like myself.

[via Gizmodo]

WERBLOG

Kevin Werbach has written a whitepaper on Sepctrum Policy, arguing that Spectrum should not be allocated as if it were policy, but rather as if it were a boundless commons. These are things the free wireless networking community has discussed for a while now, but when someone like Werbach speaks, we all listen.

I haven’t had time to read this paper yet, but i’ll be bringing it with me to Greece next week, for some quiet beach reading.

If you’re into these subjects, i suggest you do the same (and yes, that includes going to greece for a week

It argues that we should no longer treat wireless spectrum as a concrete physical resource, because new technologies make possible a range of communications techniques that don’t require exclusive control of frequencies. A universal entry privilege, allowing anyone to transmit anywhere, at any time, in any way, should be the policy baseline. A set of backstops and safe harbors drawn from tort and intellectual property law can resolve boundary disputes efficiently, without exclusive property rights. The “supercommons” represents a vast opportunity to enhance communications capacity and open up access to the airwaves.

Martin Roell blogs my presentation at the Recent FreiFunk Summer Convention in Berlin. It’s in german, so if you can’t read it, too bad

My presentation was about wireless networks for the developing world, and i’ll add a post soon with a little more details for the non-german speakers in the crowd.

Das E-Business Weblog: Wireless Community Networks in the Developing World

Tomas Krag referiert über Drahtlose Netze in Entwicklungsländern. Tomas arbeitet for informal ein Research Network and NGO. Er hat jede Menge Erfahrung mit Projekten u.a. in Ghana und Armenien als Mitarbeiter von GeekCorps.