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openmesh.com

Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2010 8:44 pm
by johnshaw
Has anyone had experiece implementing openmesh.com wireless, whether it is in a meetinghouse, work, or home... Just got turned on to it today, have spent little time looking, but seems like a very nice option for meetinghouses.

here is the URL http://www.openmesh.com

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 12:45 am
by crees
I have recently completed an open mesh install up in park city. The design was tricky at first but overall the customer is very satisfied with the coverage. On average there is a 5-10 Mbps connection to the Internet.

Pros
-Radios are very cheap in price and have been pretty reliable (Its been installed for 8 months and all the radios are still running great
-you don't have to have a hard line at each radio
-very minimal configuration
-firmware can Run on some Ubiquity and En-genius radios (great for directional coverage and gateway edge radios)
-small and compact and they have affordable wall plug enclosures
-Dual SSID Out of the box (no more or less) One SSID can be throttled up and down and also setup as a hot-spot (with web page screen and the option of authentication via 3rd party solutions) the second SSID can be setup with WEP. WPA etc.

Cons
-Default Antenna coverage may be too small (2 dBi). I ended up going with a 5dBi antenna to help extend the radius coverage.
-Open Mesh Radios are managed via open-mesh's website. This may or may not be blocked via meetinghouse firewall. If its blocked your out of luck
-due to the nature of these radios they are constantly reporting the stats and client info to the website manager. Not sure if I would want that info reported to a open mesh website.
-Depending on Building construction you will may need to place a radio every other room (if you plan to cover the whole building) and you NEVER want to have more than a couple of radios in a chain to get to one Gateway radio. In others words you can have several mesh radios (without LAN connections) connected to a Gateway mesh radio. But make sure you don't have a mesh radio connected to another mesh radio to get to the gateway. If you hop to many time via mesh to get to your gateway you end up severely cutting your bandwidth.
-Depending on building size you could easily be required to place 3+ LAN connected Gateway Radios (requiring you to run Cat5/6 wire anyways)
- If you have any frequency competition you will be fighting the default neighboring channel 6 because these radios default to channel 5 (overlapping channel)


Overall I personally would not recommend this solution for a meetinghouse setup due to the nature of the hosted solution (the fact that they are managed on open mesh website. HOWEVER If the church felt they needed more control over meeting house wireless usage then open-mesh radios may not be a bad Idea. All they would have to do is modify the open mesh open source ROBIN, then the church could have the radios point back to their own Hosted Mesh Website. Once the radios mac is entered in, they can be completely controlled and monitored with usage stats, signal strength, connected clients (with ability to block clients) and more.

Attached is a jpg of a mesh setup I installed recently. (Dark Green is a Gateway mesh Radio connected to the LAN, Light Green is a Mesh Radio (no LAN connection) and Grey is offline (unplugged in this case)

Hope this helps

Br. Rees