OpenSolaris and Municipal Wifi - It's a Snap

A new municipal Wifi mesh network was just lit up in Longmont, Colorado, USA this week. It is being privately operated by Kite Networks, and it took only 3 months to install citywide from scratch. Ten years ago, it look longer than this to provision a T1 line to a single customer! This network, on the other hand, can address tens of thousands subscribers. The picture above shows how it is installed throughout the city - rabbit ears are mounted on selected street light posts. Other cities along Colorado's Front Range are watching the progress here in Longmont, anticipating their own Wifi networks soon.

Access is free for the first three months so I naturally took my laptop running OpenSolaris down to the park. Using the nifty Inetmenu user interface, I instantly connected to the network with no problems. Just as it should be, I didn't have to mess with drivers, installation CDs, or configuration files - it just worked.

Some simple speed tests showed that I was getting about 2.1 Mbits/sec, faster than the T1 circuit that I mentioned above.

I eventually may become a subscriber but only if they agree to include OpenSolaris in the list with the other first-class supported Operating Systems. Based on my flawless connection experience today, why wouldn't they do this? Stay tuned for a progress report.

Posted at 03:51PM Dec 16, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun  |  Comments[1]