Ran into Bob Avery, the Town’s IT Director, on Franklin St. today. Turns out he’s surveying Downtown with an eye towards deploying a small pilot program of free Internet hot spots in the near future. The pilot would use Clearwire as the high-speed wireless backhaul. The only resources needed are power and location.
I cautioned Bob not to limit his planning to publicly owned infrastructure like the old Townhall. Over the last four years I’ve spoken with more than a few Downtown business and building owners willing to provide a small chunk of space and the minimal juice for access point deployments. BrianR and I have explored using solar-powered, weather-hardened rigs, strategically meshed to cover a wide area. If the Town used this environmentally sound and quite economical approach, the only remaining requirement is a decent position to throw signal.
Speaking of signal, whatever free access is deployed Downtown should stay off the already saturated channels 1, 6 and 11.
Knowing the free access topology of Downtown like the back of my hand, I encouraged him to consider West End, with a current lack of free Wifi access points (beyond UNC’s) and high density of public gathering spots (restaurants, bars,sidewalk cafes, coffee joints, bookstores), for the initial pilot.
That’s a few of my suggestions for equipment, deployment strategy and location, what are yours?
For 802.11b, unlike most other radio and TV “channels”, the 1, 6, and 11 channels are the only ones that don’t overlap. 802.11a has 8 channels which don’t overlap. So picking other channels in the presence of access points with those three channels is going to be hard.
I think it is great that they are at least doing something, though I, too, would like to see a mesh network put into place.