Tag Archives: WifiDog

News

IS4CWN 2008 Followup

Laura Forlano, Joe Plotkin, and I went to the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks in Washington, D.C. last week, and (as usual) it was a great experience. We saw FCC Commissioner Adelstein speak, and had lots of great conversations (many over beer) with a number of other CWN folks that came to the conference.

Of particular note was the significant forward progress that is being made to create a simple, unified mesh router (built on OpenWRT, OLSR, and Wifidog). We’ve got a bunch of test units and will be trying it out soon.

Steven Mansour has posted a great slideshow of the conference, and there are plenty of Flickr photos and Twitter posts.

Board of Directors

Board Meeting Summaries (January – March)

Partnerships and Events
In January, Laura Forlano submitted a proposal to advise Open Planet, an organization that seeks to empower communities to create the next generation of broadband content and services.

On three Saturdays in January, Dana Spiegel, Rob Kelley and Laura Forlano each respectively presented to a class of students at Monroe College in the Bronx.

On February 11, Dana Spiegel was on the “Spectrum Spectacular: Community Wireless and Smashing Your Way into the Thrill Ride of the Century” panel at the Grassroots Media Conference. He and Laura Forlano met with Dharma Dailey and Hannah Sassaman from Prometheus Radio Project about potential future collaboration while participating in a cantenna-building workshop.

In February, Laura Forlano and Dana Spiegel completed a detailed online survey and provided additional background information for a case study on NYCwireless as part of the World Bank infoDev’s Local Open Access Networks project.

In February, Dana Spiegel and Laura Forlano met with representatives from Edinburgh’s community wireless organization.

On February 28, Laura Forlano presented at Wireless Day at Temple University in Philadelphia. Other panelists included: Derek Pew (Interim CEO, Wireless Philadelphia), Munir Mandviwalla (Executive Director, Irwin L. Gross E-Business Institute, Fox School of Business), Nathan Solomon (Principal and Co-Founder, GameFlood) and Steve Bull (CEO, Cutlass).

From March 31-April 2, Dana Spiegel and Laura Forlano will present at the Second Community Wireless Summit in St. Charles, MO.

NYCwireless has spoken with representatives from Fon, WBAI and Prometheus Radio Project.

New Projects
On March 4, in partnership with Solar One, New York City’s first solar powered “Green Energy, Arts, and Education Center”, Rob Kelley and Dana Spiegel conducted a site survey and installed a solar-powered wireless access point in Stuyvesant Cove Park with a team of volunteers from Monroe College.

NYCwireless continues to be in discussion on plans for five new potential park projects with local businesses and community organizations.

Technology Development
NYCwireless is actively marketing its SuperNode (a.k.a. WiFiDog) access points among members, local businesses and community organizations with assistance from volunteers from Monroe College. Members are encouraged to upgrade their access points to SuperNode (contact help@nycwireless.net).

Policy
In February, Dana Spiegel and Laura Forlano briefed California Senator Dean Florez on municipal wireless policy and projects.

Resources
Wireless Networking for the Developing World, a collaborative book to which Dana Spiegel contributed following the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructure (www.wsfii.org).

NYCwireless has added a wiki-page on Uses for Municipal Wireless Networks. We welcome ideas and brainstorming for all those who are interested.

Events

NYCwireless October Meeting, Wednesday Oct. 26th!

This Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 7:15pm

Bway.net – in new home (finally!):
568 Broadway at Prince St, NE corner
Suite 404
New York, NY 10012

(Please note: Bway.net’s offices are still under construction — we apologize in advance for our appearance. Also, everybody will need to sign-in in the lobby.)

Agenda:

  1. Cybermoor: Community Wireless Broadband Network from Rural Northern England; presentation by Daniel Heery
  2. Laura Forlano will brief us on World Summit for a Free Information Infrastructure conference held earlier this month in London.
  3. WifiDog: Rob Kelley will distribute WifiDogs to anyone who brings us a Linksys WRT54G — version 4 or earlier — (please let Rob know ahead of time if you’re bringing one rob at nycwireless.net)

Cybermoor: presentation by Daniel Heery, Project Manager for Cybermoor.

Cybermoor is run as a Community Co-operative and is a non-profit making community enterprise. Daniel Heery will discuss how this was accomplished. More (Moor?) details:
http://www.cybermoor.org/
http://www.seeonline2.net/broadband/CommunitySelfHelp/CaseStudies/AlstonCybermoor/

News

Wifidog Rolls Out — with Offer!

Our pilot testing of the WifiDog federation is complete. WifiDog is a hotspot management software from Ile Sans Fil that runs on a standard Linksys WRT54G using open source firmware. With WifiDog, we can now have a federation of nodes that have access to a central server for:

  • real-time monitoring of node status
  • managed user authentication
  • splash page and login page hosting
  • web-based content management (though we haven’t quite figured it out yet!)
  • traffic statistics for each node (user counts, total throughput, and traffic by time of day)

Our federation now looks like this: http://auth.nycwireless.net/hotspots_map.php

Our goal is to look like this: http://auth.ilesansfil.org/hotspots_map.php

We want YOU to upgrade to a WifiDog. If you run an NYCwireless hotspot, we want you to switch to a WifiDog unit. If you’re planning to put up a New York hotspot, we want you make WifiDog part of your setup.

For more info on flashing a Linksys so it can run WifiDog, please see:

But wait! We’ll trade you! If you bring us a brand new plain jane Linksys WRT54G or GS, we’ll give you back a preconfigured Linksys WifiDog.

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you! Congratulations to all who have contributed so far, and to future members and users!

Events

NYCwireless June Meeting – Everyone is Invited!

This is an especially important meeting.

Please post this notice to all interested friends and related lists.

When: TONIGHT!! Wed. June 29th, 2005 at 7:15 PM
Where: Bway.net, 459 Broadway at Grand St., 2nd Floor.

Agenda

  • NYCwireless Connected Neighborhoods by Dana Spiegel & Joe Plotkin
  • WifiDog demo: a tool for managing wireless networks, by Rob Kelley (and friends)
  • WirelessLondon: A software toolkit by Jo Walsh (no, not that Joe Walsh)
  • Breakout sessions: small group discussions follow the presentations, from Novice to Advanced.

Announcing: NYCwireless Connected Neighborhood Initiative

Presentation by Dana Spiegel (Executive Director) and Joe Plotkin (Board member)

We will present NYCwireless’ plans to help under-served communities by building Open Community Networks. Expanding on the success of the three Community Access projects over the last 2 years., this will be a much more ambitious effort, and require substantial financial support thru donations.

The NYCwireless Connected Neighborhood initiative will serve to demonstrate that we all benefit when all citizens are connected. Consequently, we intend Connected Neighborhoods to act as a model and catalyst for widespread participation by government, community groups and citizens of all ages.

NYCwireless will introduce our Inaugural Open Community Network, and outline the deployment plans as well as the tools and training that will be part of this project.

Topics covered will include:

  • Technology choices
  • Site survey
  • Installation
  • Training
  • Fund-raising
  • Volunteers
  • Timetable

    • Jo Walsh:

    http://map.wirelesslondon.info is the thing we’ve just built which has wifidog-client support and provides a fair bit to look at…
    http://mappinghacks.com has a pile of links to the geospatial oriented stuff we’ve done lately

    Rob Kelley:

    A chance to review WiFiDog in action–client and server–and then test out creating your own WiFiDog hotspot. There’s a five minute demo and then a working session after the presentations.