Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Stuart Garfield
Local Motors: Open source car maker
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Preparing the smart grid for more power
NECN: Jim Connolly discusses the home of the future
While the economic downturn has pushed some nonprofits into the abyss, the one established to evaluate how to turn Boston into a wi-fi city, OpenAirBoston, has been quietly moving forward with tests, more locations and different technology platforms.
Under new CEO Brian Worobey, the organization is just a few months away from deciding on a combination of technology and a business model — or multiple models — to bring wireless Internet throughout the Hub.
Worobey, a 12-year veteran of IT handling at the Museum of Science in Boston, took over the top spot at OpenAirBoston from previous CEO Pam Reeve at the beginning of 2009. He left the museum in the summer of 2008 to become CTO at OpenAirBoston, although he had been involved right from the beginning, serving on the original Wireless Task Force that created OpenAirBoston.
In March 2008, OpenAirBoston launched its first pilot deployment of municipal wi-fi, in the Grove Hall neighborhood of Dorchester, charging the low fee of $9.95 per month.
“One of the things we learned in Grove Hall is that it is really expensive,” Worobey said. OpenAirBoston received about $700,000 in donations of commercial-grade in-kind equipment from “great manufacturers,” Worobey said.
After studying the Grove Hall deployment for some months, OpenAirBoston and the city decided it was just too expensive a solution to blanket all of Boston, according to the city’s chief information officer, Bill Oates.
“It was going to cost $12 million to $15 million at least, and we hadn’t raised anything like that over the first couple of years,” Oates said. “We needed to find a more pragmatic path.” So when Worobey took over and it was time to plan the rollout of a second location, this one in the Fenway neighborhood, he decided to look at how to make it even more affordable.
“Brian and his team have been working in the open-source, open-mesh area, which is a real opportunity to deliver wireless at a much lower cost,” Oates said.
Free air, open source
Worobey decided to go open source wherever possible. Using a router from ADI Engineering Inc. of Virginia and radios from Ubiquiti Networks Inc. of California, OpenAirBoston loaded them up with open-source software. But one of the revolutionary technologies Worobey is deploying in the second pilot is mesh networking to extend wi-fi’s reach. Through a grant, he purchased micro-mesh routers from an Oregon nonprofit called Open-Mesh. Worobey’s plan is to put as many of these routers into the hands of users, so that the wi-fi jumps from building to building, rather than from one large radio down the block to another a few blocks away.
Using this technology, the Fenway deployment has 65 users with about five users per week joining. By going low-cost and open source, the Fenway connections are free.
Next week, OpenAirBoston will be trying out a similar technology deployment in Mission Hill. After that is a roll out in the Codman Square area, using the same technology configuration, but using mesh networking equipment from Meraki Networks Inc., a California startup that was spun out of an MIT project.
“I am hoping that by the end of the summer we will have deployed the 120 or so devices we have acquired and that would be about 1,500 individuals connecting,” Worobey said, noting he was probably being conservative with that number.
If OpenAirBoston chooses the open source, free-to-connect model, Worobey is looking across the Charles River for some inspiration on how to rapidly expand the use of the mesh network routers. He is pondering a buy-one, give-one model like One Laptop Per Child has done successfully with its XO laptop. That way someone with the small amount of disposable income required to buy the router could not only connect and share that connection with nearby neighbors, but also enable someone who couldn’t afford the purchase to do the same. After all, Worobey said, it’s all about helping create community connections.
“This is your network, Boston,” he said. “This is what people have asked the city to do.”
RSS Feeds
Comments
Please Login/Register to post comments.
No comments have been added or approved.