The Wireless of Greater Bendigo

Today I installed a Hotspot at Collins Booksellers and Coffee Chapters in the Fountain Court Plaza building of the Bendigo Bank.  FREE Internet is available for one hour per person per day, further subscription options are being investigated at this point.  This Hotspot covers most of Fountain Plaza and any other businesses in the area, including Bath Lane are encouraged to sign up for a Hotspot via the Application today.

As a part of our campaign to get the BeWiFi Wireless Mesh Network expanding across the CBD we are now offering free internet access over the entire mesh network. This means local businesses can still apply for a FREE Mesh Node for a limited time and are encouraged to use their own in-house Internet connections in order to receive a free place of advertisement on the BeWiFi Start Page and in the Trades Directory.

Deploying a BeWiFi Wireless Mesh Internet Hotspot means increased business!

The application form can be found in the Main Menu.

As part of our commitment to the local community, for a limited time, we are offering free WiFi Hotspot's to local businesses in the CBD of Bendigo. These devices connect to the larger network and use our own source of internet by default. This small device, best situated in the front window or rooftop of your store, is easily assembled and virtually unnoticeable. This device will create a blanket of wireless coverage through which your employees and customers can connect to the internet as well as other localized services as provided by us.

I've been trialling different hotspot firmware solutions and have settled on Open-Mesh.

Open-Mesh is based on OpenWRT and uses either OLSR or B.A.T.M.A.N ad-hoc mesh routing protocols. In it's favour it only uses this on it's mesh layer, for public access it uses traditional AP Infrastructure mode.

Yesterday I installed a NanoStation M2 on another BeWiFi member's roof only a short distance away from the Strathdale node. Unfortunately there are a lot of gumtree's in the immediate vicinity but regardless did a great job at performing some stats.

The node end hosts 3 9dBi Pacific Wireless 120 degree 2.4GHz sectors on 9 metre LMR-400 runs to a MikroTik RouterBOARD equipped with 3 R52n radios. Obviously this is only single stream and each AP on the sector array runs in 20MHz channels.

On the last day spent at the Long Gully Tower I installed a Point-to-point to a home of BeWiFi enthusiast members. The link is approximately 4.8km's and the signal roughly -68dBm in a 20MHz channel. I have to go back to each point to line it up tighter and will expect a signal of about -56dBm. Currently in the 20MHz MIMO channel mode TCP/IP throughput is a steady 75Mbps however can expect 150Mbps+ in a 40MHz channel after the re-alignment.

I have installed a dedicated eBox server at the Strathdale node. This hosts Jabber Instant Messenger and VOIP services. Contact me if you want an account. There is a VOIP conference room on extension 8001.

In need of some network monitoring tools I have purchased and installed Groundwork Open Source Enterprise as a virtual appliance with VirtualBox. After signing up and downloading the Ubuntu based virtual appliance image from Grondwork's website it was as simple as extracting the Virtual Machine HDD Image files, creating a new Virtual Machine in VirtualBox and attaching the vmdx file as the HDD and booting.

To be continued...

Recently I attended the tower in Long Gully for some overhauls. The Mikrotik Routerboard 433 got decommissioned and replaced by a Ubiquiti Bullet M2 for each sector and a Tenda Gigabit switch at the core. The same existing Ubiquiti Bullet M5 is in place as the backhaul back to Strathdale and a new Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5 PTP was installed to a home of enthusiasts in East Bendigo. A Ubiquiti Nanostation M2 was installed but not currently being used.

I have enabled the BeWiFi Forums for discussion of Community Wireless Networking. I will begin populating the Forums with information about the existing network, how you can link in, what hardware/software to use. I encourage any community participation. I will also try to assist with advice for each of you to connect to each other and the greater network.