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Wednesday

Jun242009

Open-Mesh.com Review - create a wifi mesh for your business / neighbourhood

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 12:35PM

I started testing Open-Mesh around half way through 2008, as part of an investigation for a wifi network a client could install for a building development they were doing.

What I was looking for was something similar to Meraki, but with a lower price point. I stumbled across a new open source development that started out as disgruntled Meraki users (from what I could tell) that didn't like the price hikes.

No frills Open-Mesh Mini RouterI went ahead and ordered 2 Open-Mesh basic routers. These were under $50US, but landed in Canada, with tax and UPS "handling" fees, ended up around $150CAN. All you have to do is hook these puppies up, at least one wired into your network, and the other just needs to be with-in wifi signal distance. From there, you log into the open-mesh.com web based control panel and setup your wifi mesh.

Unfortunately for the first 6 months or so, the firmware was very flakey on the original router hardware. There has been a new hardware revision that has since been released that features temperature and power spike awareness and recovery, but on the current firmware everything seems very stable now, no long requiring a manual power cycle to get the mesh back up and running. Thankfully, firmware updates are silently pushed out to the routers.

At least one of the routers needs to be wired - the rest just need to be in mesh wifi rangeI have yet to play around with the captive portal options, but there are now many options if you wish to advertise, or collect payment for access to your wifi mesh. The ability to limit the maximum upload/download speeds is great so that your mesh users don't nail your internet link. The other feature is that it will isolate the network traffic from your internal network, so there isn't a way for the users to snoop around on your LAN subnet.