Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Reach out to various existing infrastructure projects that build and maintain large community-owned P2P WiFi deployments, the two largest ones are Freifunk and Guifi. They would surely be able to and wanting to help you, if you reach out to them. Try https://freifunk.net/en/contact/ and https://matrix.guifi.net/

Most of them are using commodity hardware from Mikrotik, Teltonika and Ubiquiti. Basic setup for a personal node is just an antenna + router. Then they usually have the concept of "supernodes" who are responsible for hooking up multiple personal nodes, and have uni-directional antennas + multiple ones + bigger routers to facilitate the routing.

I'm not sure you'll be able to put together a supernode with decent range for under $100 though, think the cost would be more than that, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

In terms of firmware, I've almost exclusively seen OpenWRT being used (and the rest running default Mikrotik/Ubiquiti firmware), with various self-made patches done to it before installing it on the hardware.

This is the right answer. The Freifunk people have a lot of experience and knowledge.

Anecdote: A while back I was moving houses ~1km with trees obstructing line-of-sight and without connectivity at the new house for the first couple of months. I had to move but could keep the old place connected. I jerry-rigged Ubiqity PtPs that I had inherited from a friend at each end. Packets started dropping on rainy days but it was working surprisingly well.

Not necessarily a fan of Ubiquity and their closed ecosystem per se, and it might not be the best pick for a project like OPs if there are options.

(Throwaway because these hotspots were brought from abroad..)

Another community project:

https://airjaldi.com/

They build and maintain long link wifi connectivity for villages in India.

A curiousity about Ubiquiti firmware. It seems like the AP firmware is based on openwrt

And IIRC a lot can be flashed with openwrt too!

their NICs will not work with regular kernel drivers. you will lose the only edge their hardware have which is dealing with a stupid large number of clients.

everything else (speed, uptime, ram/cpu power, beanforming magic, etc) you are better off with linksys devices when using open source drivers.

>speed, uptime, ram/cpu power, beanforming magic

I literally have none of these problems and I run ubiquiti everywhere

I also have a small compact car and it is fine for me to drive it every day to work, market, etc. Doesn't mean an expensive sports car is not much, much faster.

The irony is that here the compact car is more expensive :D maybe the correct analogy is a minivan, since it can hold more clients. but still, more expensive than the TP-Link sports car.

Oh, that would be handy. I have a couple, and they work just fine as regular APs. However, the odd time I do need to make changes, it's going through the whole bloated UI and management app (with MongoDB etc. installed). Really, I'd be quite happy to just run independent OpenWRT on them, since I don't need to integrate with larger infrastructure.

it is but in the worse way possible.

They take and contribute nothing back. just a base to get up and running quick in their startup days.

Also most of their own pieces is just a awful api/shell that tries very hard to simulate the worse of cisco ios shell.

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