Open Source Effort Will Deliver Low-Cost Wi-Fi for All

One of the great things about open source software is that it doesn't just bring a wealth of benefits to businesses. Rather, by making inexpensive, high-quality software widely available to everyone, it also has the potential to change lives or so the public.

Most of us are familiar with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort to put low-cost hardware in the hands of the world's poorest people, but a like-minded project that's less familiar aims to do something interchangeable with Net access.

The goal is to develop low-priced, open reservoir Wi-Fi software, and on Wednesday Geeks Without Frontiers–an initiative of the not for-profit Manna Energy Foundation–declared the final ontogeny of just such a solution.

'Millions More People'

Facilitated by a grant from the Tides Foundation, the new open80211s (o11s) engineering wish enable the development and rollout of large-scale mesh Wi-Fi networks for roughly half the cost of a tralatitious network, says Geeks Without Frontiers. Studied to use existing hardware to minimize be and maximize availability, it's expected to atomic number 4 particularly historic in areas where bequest broadband models are presently well thought out to be nonviable economically.

Shapely primarily by Cozybit, the technology is managed by Geeks Without Frontiers and I-Net Solutions and sponsored by Google, Global Get in touch, Nortel, OLPC and the Manna Muscularity Base.

"By drive pour down the cost of metropolitan and Village scale Wi-Fi networks, millions more people will be able to reap the economic and social benefits of significantly lower cost Internet access," explained Michael Potter, unmatchable of the founders of the Geeks Without Frontiers initiative.

The video below explains the imag in more contingent.

2 Authentication Methodologies

Technologically speaking, nodes and antennae will process together in these other mesh networks to put out connectivity and the Internet to a beamy domain. The networks are self-remedial, so that if one tower goes down, the software ego-assesses and automatically Ra-routes to keep the meshing at wide availability.

For security measures, interim, the new Wi-Fi software uses the strongest authentication methodology known to exist for mesh networks, the group says. Specifically, additionally to Coincident Authentication of Equals (SAE) to protect against offline dictionary attacks, it also implements Authenticated Ensnarl Peering Exchange (AMPE), which enables multiple authenticated nodes to encrypt traffic among themselves.

The combination of high-degree security and open source write in code is planned to help ensure that new networks supported on o11s are safer and yet significantly cheaper to deploy.

The close step for the jut is to complete the current hospitable informant implementation of the coming IEEE mesh standard 802.11s, which is expected be ratified in the fourth quarter of this year. In the meantime, the latest version of the software is disposable for developers on the o11s internet site.

A World of New Possibilities

So what does this mean for those of U.S.A in the business world who are already fortunate sufficiency to have Internet access? In a nutshell, information technology's going away to mean a very different worldwide on the Internet, inhabited not just aside the "haves" but increasingly away those who were formerly the "have-nots" as well.

That's a very good thing, not just for all those coming on get on at last–who will suddenly find themselves faced with a inexperient wealth of opportunities–merely also for us in the business world, aside virtue of the dramatically enhanced numbers of potential customers and markets.

It's going to require new predisposition on our part, without doubt, as we must more and more realize that many a of the consumers seeing our online ads, say, may live not in community subdivisions simply quite in village huts.

But the opportunities volition glucinium there, not antitrust for advertising and communicating simply for new types of products and services as well. This would be a redemptive prison term to get going thinking about what your company will do with this fresh new world of possibilities.