Paris broke all the records with a 543% year-over-year increase in the number of wireless access points detected in the city. At 15%, New York City remains the leader in regards to its concentration of hotspots.

ISPReview notes:

In London, the volume of personal ‘home’ wireless access points was greater even than the number of corporate ones… Most impressively, home network users appear to be more security-savvy than their corporate counterparts.

Read on at ISPReview, or RSA’s press release.

Nothing on Sydney though.

a

Early WLANs focused on growing the number of access points to cover a given area. But today, many wireless administrators are focusing more attention on scaling capacity. That focus is a broad one, calling for a deeper understanding of what access points are capable of, and paying more attention to scaling back-end systems, servers and networks.

Multimedia use is surging, and 802.11n is expected to make it surge still more. All these universities are configuring their wireless LANS for multicast support, to minimize bandwidth demands where possible. Users in effect tune into a single multicast stream (analogous to viewing broadcast TV) rather than each one receiving his or her own separate, unicast stream.

Read on at Network World.

a

a

If an utterly trivial movie like Sex and the City can recognise how important technology is – and how we are increasingly reliant on being connected in order to do business – isn’t is a shame the state government can’t see it the same way.

Maybe I should go see it then…

a

a

“Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways.“    

Big thanks to Nat for driving up to Sydney from Canberra in the morning (4 hours!), and back again in the evening! And big thanks also to Alison to show up and help out (on her free day, and with beautiful weather outside). Sometimes the two of us just wasn’t enough to handle all people at the booth.

a

“I purposely go to a cafe in my home town that offers free wi-fi. I drive by 3 Starbucks on the way there and pay 50 cents more for the mocha for the free wi-fi.”

As an added bonus, the coffee may probably be better too… Read more over at Computer World.

If I think of all the small, independent coffee shops around town, you could form a really big mesh of free wifi in the CBD.

a

Quick write-up. Playing around with the Pro dashboard. Main different feature is the user registration (and the possibility of billing, but I won’t be using that). It is disappointing that you can’t limit bandwidth/usage on a per user basis, I thought the usage configuration would be more elaborate. You can also disable the spashpage and the messaging toolbar, but I want to use both of them anyway. So, not sure if it’s worth the extra 100$, tripling the price of the Mini, or double the price of the Outdoors.

Now both the Outdoors and the Mini Pro are gateways. When I unplug the Mini Pro from my router, it automatically connects to the Outdoors, which is pretty cool (the meshing feature). But because that is a Standard version, the Mini becomes a Standard too (as expected).

I can now also see the other neigbor network through the dashboard, so when two Meraki networks are within each others reach, they can see each other, and connect to each other when one’s connection drops (as tested by unplugging). When connected to one, I can get the signal strength of the other through my.meraki.com, in dB. The Outdoors (euh, outdoors) with high-gain antenna gives me 58dB, the Mini indoors gives me 50dB.

a

Luckily I had a backup, which didn’t really work…

So took the opportunity to upgrade WordPress to its latest version at the same time.

All well again, pfeww.
(unless you see something weird, then please leave a comment)

a

“The project is being initially sponsored by Webstock 2008 and Govis, who are creating a fund with their donations of NZ$5,000 and $9,000 respectively to purchase those devices and donate to individuals and companies who want to start sharing their networks.”

Webstock is a NZ web conference (WebDirections South, are your reading this?)…

Read all about the project at Geekzone.co.nz and TheFreeNet (Aotearoa).

a