Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community wide Wifi

[Diana Carroll (dianaecarroll]

In our community, the "health" of community wide wifi would be an
irrelevant argument, whether it did or did not have scientific merit; we
are a very tech-heavy community, and I'd be shocked if there were any
physical spot in any place in our community that wasn't already being
reached by at least five different wifi access points.  If our brains are
being turned to mush by wireless signals, we're all screwed anyway, and I
doubt one more signal will hasten our descent into whatever awaits us.

Trying to keep one's home radio-signal-free around here would be like
running your air filter to clean your air...while keeping all your doors
and windows wide open.

(And that's just wifi; never mind all the other radio "noise" we all swim
in: TV and radio broadcasts, remote garage door openers, GPS signals,
wireless computer accessories, cell phones, etc etc.)

I actually DO worry that our society's saturation of our environment with
massive quantities of electromagnetic waves affects our health.  My friends
would be surprised to hear it but I actually fall in the "this is probably
bad" camp.  But it's bad like acid rain and greenhouse gasses; no one's
individual health is going to be affected by the addition or removal of one
single source of noise. :-/.   So I shrug my shoulders and chalk it up to
the cost of living today instead of a hundred years ago before we did this,
or a hundred years from now when we've figured out how not to f---
ourselves.

Diana



On Monday, January 27, 2014, R.P. Aditya <aditya [at] grot.org> wrote:

>
> 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
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