Pretoria Wireless Project:About
From Pretoria Wireless Project
PWP is about bringing together as many of the wireless access points out there (in Pretoria) on a single network. This does not necessarily mean one physical network but rather a community network.
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History
PWP was formed by malec and gripen in 2004. There was little progress initially since the website (a critical aspect of any online community) was a basic forum and not much more.
In 2005, th0rn joined the ranks of the hardworkers in PWP and became a member of the core team. Th0rn brought on a revival of commitment due to his passion for the technology and also the fact that he had a bunch of equipment to play with.
The website was relaunched as a Wiki in mid November 2005. The thinking was that regular members could contribute to a database of information for other prospective and interested users. A new forum was created at this time. Thus, the existing forum includes currently active/interested members.
Mission Statement
To co-operatively build and maintain a city wide community owned wireless network infrastructure using 802.11 equipment in a not-for-profit way.
Goals
- Establish a fault resistant, fully redundant wireless mesh type network in the Pretoria area
- Develop a platform for offering various internet and media services to schools, hospitals and other organisations (Disclaimer)
- Minimise barriers to entry including reducing inital cost to users and to provide education on how the network operates and how to join
- Provide a valuable educational resource about WiFi, 802.11 and online community networks
Roadmap
Our main current objective is to create functional links with many nodes. The first "step" will be developing a sub-network backbone in the Centurion area. We hope to have a full backbone operational by end January 2006.
At the same time or immediately following our first backbone, another backbone will be developed in Pretoria central. The initial backbone will be built by linking up with the COIN network. Active links should be in place by the end of February 2006.
In Q1 2006, PWP plans to register as a section 21 Non-profit company in order to be able to offer services (read Disclaimer) to various organisations and individuals.
PWP is also investigating involving educational institutions in the project. In a preliminary investigation some schools have been contacted and have shown some interest in getting connected.
More details will be provided as they are developed.
Future vision
As an interesting point of note, the following is the future vision as explained by gripen:
Eventually, the PWP network will become quite large and encompass most of the densely populated wider Pretoria area. In addition, PWP will have links to the JAWUG network.
At this time, the 1000 or so members will all regularly use the community portal (website) to keep up to date with the status of the network, to request various services (and get help/support) and to interact with other members of the community.
The community will offer a wide range of features including file hosting/sharing, local email, IRC, IM, forums, web hosting, internet access (Disclaimer), internet bandwidth peering, commercial offerings by use of the community platform, events, VoIP, VideoOverIP, local video streaming stations, streaming radio, educational sites, online gaming and more
The speed of the network at this time will be acceptably high due to phased integration of 802.11n technologies as well as intelligent routing and network protocol implementation. The network will function similar to a mini-Internet.
It is envisaged that at this stage, the cost to utilise the network will still be non-existant and all the above functionality will be offered as add-ins. Thus, PWP will only be responsible for the provision of the community platform i.e. the wireless network
