Open-Mesh is a extremely low-cost, plug & play wireless mesh network solution that might just be what you need for your church and/or ministry.
They provide all the components and pieces that you’d need and give you a nice control panel to manage the system as well. Set up your usage policies and you’re good to go.
You can even design your own splash pages if you want to get a bit creative.
Sounds like a good choice and option if you’re in the market!
Thanks Scott for the headsup!
Here are some great screenshots of some of the back admin courtesy of John Voorhis:
Your welcome John!
You can find some of my testing and observations that I put together for the Church IT Roundtable peeps here: http://itglyphs.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-mesh-wireless-aps.html
and some screenshots of the config screens here:
http://itglyphs.blogspot.com/2009/09/open-mesh-config.html
OMG. AWESOME! I’m going to add those to the post.
Glad it’s useful
awesome. updated.
very cool John
word up.
Killer.
Doesn’t using a mesh cause problems with throughput? Most wireless devices can only send or receive data at one time, not both. Because of this limitation each additional wireless hop halves the throughput, however, I hear this can be remedied by using an access point which is wired to the backbone where possible, using the wireless only nodes essentially as repeaters.
not sure. you probably know better than i do.
This is correct, in the case of Open-mesh (other more expensive solution have dual radios). The members of the CITRT (www.citrt.org) that have tested them see about a halving in speed for each hop away you get from the wired connection. However, as you mention you can have multiple entry points for the wired connection in the mesh and it will balance and do least cost routing accordingly. Still, for the money and simple needs it’s a great solution, not meant to compete with the likes of Aruba, etc.
A couple other interesting features are the ability to use a unit to connect a machine that doesn not have a wireless adapter, and no cable run nearby. Also , POE injectors are are interesting stop gap for those need remote acces, but don’t have POE swtiched.
sweet. thanks for the clarificatoin.
Thanks for the insight John.
Open Mesh is good but there are several other variations out there.
Including utilising current hardware and then setup a “free” wi-fi network or mesh (with vlans) using producst like PublicIP (formerly ZoneCD) or Ruckus Zone Director to Meraki and I’m certain there must be more.
Good post though – keep them coming
We actually just sold all of our Cisco wireless AP’s and Controllers on craigslist and moved to open-mesh. I really like the price and how easy it is to setup. We have approx 30 ap’s throughout our building. 2 sep SSID’s, one for the public the other for our local peps. They are working on getting the local lan bridged so that you can hit nodes on your lan with your own dhcp/dns. For not they just nat the connections. You can hit the ip but names do not resolve. All in all I am glad we made the move.
hi — i have 4 omp1′s which were donated to us. could anyone tell us how to replace the old settings with new settings?