Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community wide Wifi

[R.P. Aditya (aditya]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 06:57:51PM -0700, Willow Murphy wrote:
> How have other communities dealt with Wifi?   Our concern regards
> considerations of whether it is safe/healthy or not to place community wide
> hotspots in our community.

We have a community wide wired ethernet network that radiates out from
the common house. Using that as the "backbone" we provide wireless nodes
inside and outside the CH and within many of the individual units based
on resident requests:

  http://www.gocoho.org/campus/go-net

and have had it up and running for about 10 years now.

We tried using low-end "consumer grade" wireless devices early on, but
keeping them all working, monitoring them to find and fix problems on
our shared commercial Internet connection became increasingly
difficult. As more folks opted for their own wireless devices in their
homes, the interference between uncoordinated devices increased and so
it was a true tragedy of the wireless spectrum commons...

We then switched to using units from meraki (now owned by Cisco) which
are "cloud-managed" and that worked great until meraki increased the
prices...so we have now switched to:

  http://www.open-mesh.com/

and that is working well, though having 5Ghz radios would be better...if
we choose to upgrade, we'd probably see if there was anything better
than:

  http://www.ubnt.com/unifi

which seems to be the current favorite...

Hope that helps,
Adi

-- 
Adi
Great Oak Cohousing
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
http://www.gocoho.org