Our friends at Brick Weekly have a nice piece this week on Richmond Free Wireless, an insane project to make the entire region one massive, free WiFi hub.
Enter Meraki, a company that formed around a group of MIT students and
their PhD research project. Their goal was to create simple, affordable
hardware capable of broadcasting an at large wireless signal. The
result was the Meraki radio units—fifty bucks for an indoor unit, a
hundred dollars for an outdoor one. A solar powered unit is in the
works and, according to the company’s website (http://www.meraki.com), will be available soon.
Mohr quickly saw the potential of the Merakis; they were cheap and
ridiculously easy to use. He programmed the basic architecture to
string together a network of them. Two weeks ago, he put up his own
site, Richmond Free Wireless (http://www.richmondfreewifi.org).
Richmond blogs began to buzz with the news. Mohr is in negotiations
with several businesses about hosting, but for now he’s keeping mum for
fear of jinxing the deal. Exciting indeed, but he is hoping for and
dependent on community involvement. Ultimately, the project will
succeed one gateway and one node at a time.
Back on Justin’s porch, we gathered around the unassuming Meraki.
Mohr stared at something off in the distance. Following his gaze, I
turned around and there it was– the WTVR tower, over 1000 vertical feet
of glorious potential. Mohr looked as if he had just found the object
of his greatest desire.
“If only we could get a unit on top of that.”
You can add your own little electronic voice to the network by going to Richmond Free Wireless' website.
