Next month in November I’ll be travelling across to Perth for the Edge of the Web conference – both to see some great speakers and presentations but also to be providing the wireless mesh network hardware and support to provide conference attendees with free Internet access throughout the conference.
Stil wrote about the National Broadband Network in the recently released Federal Budget 2008 on Crickey with a follow-up post on his own blog: Rudd government delivers yesterday’s broadband.
It’s funny; just a couple of days ago when I met with David Mathews we were talking about something similar but with with the rollout of TransACT a few years back and how that network and infrastructure was obsolete before the project was completed.
And we’re about to see a repeat of that. In fact, as Stil says, other countries are already rolling out networks with speeds far above what is in the spec for this National Broadband Network.
So it seems we haven’t learned any lessons from previous such projects and we’re about to waste a whole lot of money doing it again – or are we? Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.
Wireless infrastructure on the other hand is far more scalable and easier to upgrade.
Read the story on Australian IT.
A wireless mesh network here would have helped as a redundancy mechanism – although even assuming that there was a saturation of nodes in place (and as far as I know there would be lucky to be half a dozen advertised open networks) to cover that sort of area is beyond the capability of a mesh network if there were no gateways in that region and the entire mesh was running off the closest gateway nodes to the communication blacked-out area; Meraki advises no more than 10 hops off a gateway, so with 200 metre range Meraki Outdoor units you could at best cases penetrate 2km into a suburb that has no gateway nodes operational. But still – that’s better than nothing. That could have reduced the number of affected homes and businesses by 20% in this case.
Just to illustrate another benefit of wireless mesh networks.
