Richmond Free WiFi Blog

We’ve received word from Meraki, our equipment provider, that they’re keeping the pricing currently set at $49 for an indoor node and $99 for an outdoor node until the end of December:

мебеликомпютри втора употребаWe’ve heard from many of you that you’d like more time to purchase hardware for your legacy network at the original prices ($49 indoor, $99 outdoor) to finish building out existing networks. Existing customers may purchase legacy devices from now until the end of the year (December 31, 2007). To place a legacy edition order, please call our sales department at +1.650.810.8500.

If you have questions and/or would like to help us grow the network, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Last week, we received word that our equipment provider, Meraki, was changing its business models by offer three different levels of service for its customers. These new levels, and their respective differences may be accessed via this link.

We’ve considered going with the “Pro” level of service because it initially offered the ability to keep the customized SSID, i.e. the ability to keep using “RichmondFreeWireless” as our access ID, along with the ability to keep a customized splash page and redirect options. Initially, Meraki stated they would basically allow us to keep these features, which we can currently do anyway, for a price of paying 1.5 times more for their equipment than the current pricing. This means the radios would have caused $150 and $199, for indoor and outdoor units, respectively, versus the current price of $49 and $99, respectively. Needless to say, we were very much taken aback, as were other Meraki customers. I had even gone as far as posting this message on DSLReports, where I moderated a very active WISP forum for a number of years.

Fortunately, Meraki listened to their customers and made positive changes. That being said, we’re considering sticking with the “Standard” version as this allows us to keep our customized splash page and SSID features. Meraki is still working on the code changes to make this happen. While they are doing this, we’re planning on sticking with the Legacy version (our current version) until the changes are complete, after receiving this clarification directly from Meraki:

Thanks for your inquiry. With our Standard Edition, we are enabling the ability to fully customize your SSID. We are also working on ways for users to include community information and ad support on their splash page. Standard edition products will continue to list at $49 and $99. Please let me know if you have any further questions moving forward.

We realize that our network will not make it without your support. We’ll continue to monitor Meraki’s changes and keep everyone informed.

If you’d like to contribute to the network and to our project, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Some of our generous gateway bandwidth donors are starting to use OpenDNS for the RFW network. What is OpenDNS you ask? Excellent question! Some of its features include (from the OpenDNS website. Note: Some of the features below are turned off or on by the respective bandwidth donor) Click on the picture to the right for a screenshot of OpenDNS in action on the RFW network:

• Phishing protection - OpenDNS operates PhishTank.com, the world’s most trusted source of phishing data. We integrate that data into an intelligence feed on our DNS servers to keep everyone on your network safe from phony sites trying to steal personal information.
• Adult site blocking - Safeguard your kids, protect your students, or limit your corporate liability by blocking adult websites. Our adult site blocking solution can be deployed in minutes and provides granular levels of blocking. Did we mention it’s completely free?
• Typo correction - We don’t think you should be punished with an annoying error message if you make a small typo, like typing google.cmo instead of google.com. That’s why we correct that typo, and thousands more like it every day.
• Large cache - OpenDNS operates the largest and most intelligent DNS caches in the world. As a result, when you ask us a question, we almost always have the answer. This results in an overall faster way to navigate the Internet.
• Ultra-reliable network - Our architecture was designed to withstand even the worst of network failures and still serve your DNS reliably. Feel free to dive in and learn more about our architecture and how we run a zero-downtime network.

For more info, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in helping out! If you’re ready to participate, check out our “host a node” page.

Every so often we check our daily stats to see how much data is being moved across the Richmond Free Wireless network. As of this moment, we’ve had 10 users in the last day download over 1.5Gb of data. Overall, we’ve had 66 users download over 4Gb of data since we’ve established the network only a couple of months ago. Not too bad for a fledgling free wireless network that doesn’t actively market itself.
If you’re interested in checking out our stats, feel free to do so via the following pages:

• Real-time data transfer & node uptime page
• Node location map

As always, if you’d like to expand the network from this node or even set up a gateway with your connection to share throughout your neighborhood, feel free

to check out our “help expand the network” page.

For those of you connecting to our network, Meraki issued a post in their forums today regarding slowness issues:

We have been experiencing unexpected slow database response throughout the morning. Symptoms include not being able to access https://dashboard.meraki.com or seeing HTTP 500 errors while navigating through the site. We are working on tuning the database. This issue will not effect your local network unless your users are trying to access the billing portion.

FYI, we’re not using the billing software.

If anyone has any questions/concerns, please feel free to post them in our discussion forum.