Richmond Free WiFi Blog

Glad to hear via the Hills & Heights community blog that FiOS is coming to that area!  Since they mentioned RFW in their plug, I thought it only fair to reciprocate!  An RFW gateway hooked up to a FiOS connection would open up a lot of possibilities.  When another RFW radio “sees” a main gateway node (the unit connected to the Internet), this simply expands the network further, building a mesh-type infrastructure and allowing more and more people to jump on.

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.

Greg Hershey, of Brick Weekly, wrote an awesome article about our project, along with an effective picture of the project’s founder (left) by Jay Paul. We not only had the pleasure of being written about but Greg was kind enough to join us for a tour of one of our gateways to get a true sense of our vision as well as seeing, in person, how effective our project and overall efforts really are.

I met Mohr and his son Matt on Saturday morning at the Science Museum. He wanted to show me the first step on the yellow brick road of his dream—city wide, free wireless internet. We walked a few short blocks and knocked on the door of a typical Fan apartment. We were greeted by Justin, a pioneer, the first link of what Mohr hopes will be a Richmond-wide net of volunteers. On Justin’s second-story porch, we gathered around a small box with an antenna on top. Not much bigger than a cigarette pack, this box is what makes Mohr’s dream technologically feasible, a Meraki radio unit.

Thanks for the plug, Greg. We greatly appreciate it!

Special thanks, as well, to John Sarvay of Buttermilk and Molasses fame, for plugging Greg’s story to the RVA blog masses!

Brenda P over at the Petersburg People’s News has generously donated one of her banner ad slots to further support our project. PBURGPN.net is the place to visit for the latest news and information related to Petersburg.

Thanks for helping out, Brenda!

Special thanks to John Murden for generously donating banner space on his Church Hill People’s News (CHPN) website for the RFW project!

We wholeheartedly support John’s and the entire RVA News Blog community, many of them aggregated at RVABlogs,  for their tireless efforts and community involvement.  We’re working on a page we hope to attached to our network splash page in a few weeks that will be dedicated to the RVA News Blog community as well as our other supporters.

Thanks again, John!  Keep up the excellent work!

Special thanks to Richard Sebastian for tagging us via the Richmond.com article. Richard’s blog is very inspiring, particularly to those in the educational arena who utilize technology in their curricula. One may actually get a change to watch Richard work on his dissertation via his ustream.tv broadcast.

We found Richard’s comment regarding the educational implications of our project particularly interesting and insightful.

The educational implications of this project are especially exciting. Free wireless, especially in and around poorer communities, is yet another way to provide lower-income students with much needed access the Internet.

Thanks, Richard, for your kind words and encouragement!