Community Wireless Summit Decompression

So here we are sitting at the Sheraton in St. Charles, MO. It may sound like the beginning to a bad joke: “I am sitting in a bar with an Anthropologist and Physcologist from Intel, people from the and Ghanna Community Wireless Network, Eastern India Community Wireless and of course Matt.”

Bogdan of Belgrade Wireless just got done describing the network in Belgrade which has 30 interconnected nodes and close to 400 users. The kicker is that the majority of people actually use the network for local communications. Currently the nodes are mostly running Atheros G cards in turbo mode for the point to point links and they experience network speeds of close to 80mbs on the turbo mode point to point links. Its awesome to see community wireless taking off in so many places all over the world. One the coolest things wasto here Bogdan say when he started talking about his project was that its not about internet access, first and foremost its about building a local communications network.

John from Wireless Ghana is working on the project on tour with the Peace Corps. He initially joined the Peace Corp to be a math teacher, but is quite happy now working the wireless ghana network which now has 8 interconnected nodes on their network with 1kb VSAT uplink.

Among other things I have been describing to them the Seattle coffee scene, David Schomer’s espresso preparation innovations, and decompressing from the conference and the tornado incident earlier in the day.
The Summit went off with out a hitch, props to Sascha for putting it together and props to everyone that attended to discuss and share their experiences, visions, and inspiration.