Free Australia Wireless Network : Free Canberra Wireless | Free Sydney Wireless
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gets the point, over at San Francisco's SFGate: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that citywide wireless Internet access is slowly becoming a reality despite political infighting - and that 144,000 residents will be surfing the Web for free by the end of the year at no cost to the city. He's talking about the Meraki network of course: Newsom is calling the idea Wi-Fi 2.0 - a nod to his high-profile but unsuccessful first attempt to bridge the "digital divide" between San Franciscans who take Internet access for granted and low-income people who can't easily log ...
Not to turn you off in using any open Wifi hotspots, but NO, it is not secure using an open Wifi hotspot. After all, it is 'open' for anyone to join. That means anyone could read along with what you are reading (given some specific network sniffing tools). In a secured, closed wireless network, the data exchange between your device and the access point would be encrypted, so people wouldn't be able to snoop in. That makes it a lot safer to read your emails, log into your Facebook account, or whatever. Because of openness of the network, you should avoid connecting ...
ACMA takes notice as it publishes its Top 5 Trends (pdf) in new communications services, applications and emerging technologies to keep an eye out on for the next five years, including Mesh Networks. There’s even an honourable mention of SydneyFreeNet.
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 Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.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.
A quick one.
If you’re thinking of setting up a local hotzone, a nice How-To: Set up a Wi-Fi Hotzone Using Meraki part 1 / part 2. Nice general overview, but could be a bit more in depth. (yes, we’ll need to write one ourselves.)
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.
BarCamp Sydney v3 has passed again. We set up a wireless network for attendees to use. With the Internet connection handled by UNSW, so plenty of bandwidth, we set up two gateway nodes and one repeater (one Outdoor and two Mini’s). Of course, we could easily manage the splashpage with a BarCamp welcome, as well as have BarCamp and Free Australia Wireless text banners.
The Meraki’s handled traffic pretty good, with people playing WoW, watching youTube, surfing, demoing,… with the Meraki’s handling about 50 users and transferring 1.8 Gb over each day.
You can clearly see when lunch was on…
We talked to lots of people, mostly in the hallway, and in our presentation on Saturday we focused on the Meraki Dashboard and its settings. We also had a group discussion on developing meshing software for mobile devices or laptops. And then there was even a presentation on how, with the help of a couple of Merakis, a student circumvented his school’s net censorship… Some people signed up for a group buy (we’ll get back to you soon!).
Sunday afternoon, we had a Meraki Mini to give away to the attendees.
Another great day at Wireless World. More positive feedback, support and best wishes – which was really encouraging. Mark Pesce gave a presentation titled “Everywhere” at the main speaking slot at the Wireless and Mobility Summit.
Lots of people were interested in being involved in the project with some even committing to participate in the next hardware bulk buy. We also gained some valuable contacts with vendors, organisations and government bodies which we will be looking for opportunities to work with in the future.
Day 1 at the Wireless World expo was quite successful. Lots of positive feedback (nearly non negative), and great industry contacts. Read Nat’s write-up:
“Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways.”
Big thanks to Nat for driving up to Sydney from Canberra in the morning (4 hours!), and back again in the evening! And big thanks also to Alison to show up and help out (on her free day, and with beautiful weather outside). Sometimes the two of us just wasn’t enough to handle all people at the booth.
Sydney Morning Herald picks up Free Sydney Wireless:
“Frustrated by the NSW Government’s stalled free wi-fi project, a group of Facebookers have decided to start their own.”
“Free Sydney Wireless’ next recruiting drive will be in March at Barcamp, an informal web developers’ get-together. “We will try to set up a wireless net at Barcamp using Merakis, in the hope that it spurs more people to install their own Meraki.”
Read all at SMH.com.au
If you’re interested in joining the fun (get a Meraki), head over to the Facebook group and look into the group buy post (but you do need a Facebook account – try to sort that out with an open forum or wiki soon).
Not to turn you off in using any open Wifi hotspots, but NO, it is not secure using an open Wifi hotspot. After all, it is ‘open’ for anyone to join. That means anyone could read along with what you are reading (given some specific network sniffing tools).
In a secured, closed wireless network, the data exchange between your device and the access point would be encrypted, so people wouldn’t be able to snoop in. That makes it a lot safer to read your emails, log into your Facebook account, or whatever.
Because of openness of the network, you should avoid connecting to any Web site or service that requires password authentication that is not specifically secured using SSL (the little lock that appears in your browser). This includes email that does not requires an SSL connection, and FTP. You should therefor limit your wireless usage to general Internet surfing.
So how can you make accessing an open network more secure?
And as always, you may want to take the necessary precautions to secure your computer as well. Make sure your computer is up to date with the latest security fixes, and use an anti-virus and anti-spyware software as well as a software firewall to protect against intrusions. Make sure you don’t have any shared folders, and password-protect access to your computer.
Update: WebWorkerDaily : “4 Ways to Keep Your Public Wi-Fi Sessions Secure“
