[Lula] Announcing the Southern California Wireless Project

[Charles N Wyble]

Hello Everyone,

    For about a year now I have been working on a project to build out a
large scale wireless network in the Southern California region. I have
done a substantial amount of research, given a number of presentations
on various topics related to networking and wireless and made a number
of valuable legal and technical contacts. As such I would like to
officially announce the Southern California Wireless Network project and
invite any interested parties to join.

I am sending this message out to a number of mailing lists via bcc. This
will be the only post to all of those lists. Further discussion can take
place on the socalwifi-general list. Details for this mailing list can
be found at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/socalwifi-general

Quick Project Details:

Wiki: http://wiki.socalwifi.org/index.php/Main_Page (Lots of info here.
Please feel free to peruse it and update the wiki).
SourceForge Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/socalwifi

I am sending this message out to a very large audience, as this is a
major project and can use all the help it can get. :)

Here is where I am sending this message. My apologies to anyone who is
on multiple lists. I tried to get all of the LUGS that I have
attended/participated in/presented at.

SoCal Groups:

UUASC
LiLAX
LAMPSIG
LULA
UCLA LUG
SCLUG
SGVLUG
SFVLUG
SoCal Asterisk Users Group
SoCal Wireless Users Group

Please pass this message along to anyone else you think may be interested.


    Many areas of Southern California provide wireless access. I have
started a list of those deployments and  more detail on them can be
found at  at
http://wiki.socalwifi.org/index.php/Main_Page#Existing_Southern_California_Wireless_Deployments 




).  Feel free to add information about the various cities which are
currently empty pages, and any new cities/areas that are providing
access in the Southern California region (including things like a
neighborhood hot spot at a private residence, coffee shops with open
access points, cities providing wireless coverage).

These deployments break down into a couple areas:

1) Free or low cost access to the internet for end users.
2) City services.

Well we have all seen the free access model fail horribly all over the
United States.

The city services is a viable model and has been quite successful, but
that generally involves a substantial amount of money and large
incumbent vendors such as Motorola.

I believe that a compromise between these two things is possible, which
will allow large amounts of wireless coverage, support for municipal
services and a steady revenue stream for the maintainers of the network.

So I decided it would be wise to learn from them, and link them together
into one large network. The eventual goal is wireless coverage from
Santa Barbra to San Diego. Thats certainly not going to happen over
night, but it is quite doable.

I will say up front, that this is an open source project (all
documentation/design/firmware changes/coding etc etc etc) will be
licensed under the GPL v3.  Access to the network will NOT be free of
cost. Why should it be? Operating a high capacity network costs money.
We all have to pay for internet access now, bandwidth limited and TOS
bound though it may be.

No the goal of this network is to create a network that is free as in
freedom. The first revolution was free/open source software, and it has
certainly been a challenge, but has produced very tangible results and
changed the playing field forever. Oh and it didn't bring the world to
an end, or destroy the software companies. :)

Now we are at the forefront of another revolution, the building of a
next generation network that will be free from the restrictions of a
powerful conglomerate of media companies.

As the cost of access via the traditional incumbents increases, and the
quality of service continues to decrease, we are rapidly approaching a
point where we live in a fully locked down world. I certainly don't want
that, and I think that most people on the lists I am sending this
message to (if not all of them but I learned a long time ago to never
say always) don't want that either.

So how do we fight this revolution? We build our own network, comprised
fully of open source/free software, hardware, terms of service and we
deliver video/voice communications and content to the users.

This is a very large project that will take several years. So is/was the
free software movement.

I have thought about this project for some time now and realized it
breaks down into various major areas:


1) Back end infrastructure services.  Things like RADIUS/Directory
Services/DNS etc. I have purchased some virtual private servers on the
east coast, and am in the process of setting up RADIUS/BIND for the
network. I will be deploying some servers in a co location facility in
downtown Los Angeles in May, which will replicate from the east coast
data center and provide a "local master".  As the network grows, people
can help replicate from the Los Angeles local master to their various
geographic regions.

I have registered socalwifi.net and plan to use that as the DNS name
space for hosts/routers/phones etc that are on the network.  If anyone
would like to help with setting up these services please let me know.  I
will fully document the setup of the services on the wiki.

2) Wireless access. This includes things such as end user access points
, point to point connections, meshing, traffic shaping, token passing
(via something like http://frottle.sourceforge.net/),
WiMAX/Celluar/Microwave back haul  etc. I have done some research into
this area and am very interested in feedback from people who have worked
on these type of things and have expertise to share. I am actively
following a number of other community wireless projects via their
mailing lists and IRC channels, and have learned a lot.

3) Network design. This covers everything from the layout of the
subnets, to routing (OSPF and BGP), peering, IPv6, OpenVPN etc. Lots to
do here. If you have a network engineering background and/or would like
to participate in designing a very large scale network please let me
know! :)

4) Revenue generating services. Somehow the network has to be paid for.
I see VoIP and IPTV being a couple revenue streams that could support
the network. Obviously this will require substantial tuning and large
amounts of access points, but I believe it can be done.

My goal is for this network to be designed at a large scale, but grow
organically.  Router by router, house by house, neighborhood by
neighborhood, mesh by mesh. I know many of us have setup hot spots, and
perhaps even charged a fee to use the network. That's fantastic!
Lets keep doing that, and at the same time have an eye to linking them
all together.

Doing this requires a good amount of design and implementation work, but
is quite doable. Their are certainly a lot of issues to work through, as
their are in any large network implementation. How often does a massive
large scale network get to be designed from scratch? Most large networks
started as a series of smaller ones that were linked together. Going
with the 2.0 theme that seems to abound today, lets build Network 2.0.

I'll close by saying that Los Angeles is the second largest  IT employer
in the United States. Surely among the members of these lists, and the
greater Los Angeles technology community we can find enough network and
system engineering expertise to participate in building out such a large
scale network.

Thank you for your time.

-Charles Wyble
http://charlesnw.blogspot.com