SeattleWireless Node Fundraiser

[Michael Mee]

Daevid Vincent wrote:
> I'm all about supporting a good cause. And I'm all about the belief that
> wifi should be free (I run a Linux box with 8dbi antenna in Redmond, and
> it's an open node). I'm not trying to troll, I'm just confused as to what
> the benefit of this is when there are thousands of open nodes in the city
> (albeit not linked together).

As someone building lots of free wireless in San Diego (who used to live 
in Seattle and has walked by that tower many times I think), here are 
some advantages as I see them:

+ ability to aggregate and relay bandwidth from point A to point B

For example, we have had several people offer T1 lines to us (one guy 
had 3 of them that were mostly idle that were an offsite hot backup) but 
couldn't find a way to backhaul them to somewhere we could use them. A 
tower with wide visibility would provice a LOT of flexibilty

+ cross linking locations for redundancy, handwidth sharing

A variation on the above. Sometimes we have an existing network and want 
to link it to another location, but there's no line of sight. A tower 
can solve this. With this solution I can provide failover, 'backdoor' 
access for configuration if a frontdoor link fails, and ultimately 
bandwidth sharing if a feed gets overloaded.

+ line of sight for ~clean 5.8 GHz gear

5GHz gear requires much better line of sight than 2.4, so the higher the 
better. 2.4 is more flexible, but its getting awfully saturated in urban 
areas.

+ lots of things that haven't been thought of yet

when using line of sight frequencies, height is everything. I agree that 
this is a fantastic opportunity and I wish you all the best in your fund 
raising drive!

There's a reason these high places can command high monthly rents - to 
be offered one gratis is amazing!

cheers, michael
www.socalfreenet.org