Linux Faire 2009

Was a lot of fun. On April 17th, I had written that there is a new Federal Program looking at rolling out broadband to rural areas. Today, I met up with a team that is looking at doing this in Bellingham. They are deploying clusters of cheap nodes to deliver a web of WiFi hotspots throughout town. The key thing is that they are gathering a lot of the data on how to do this through other websites and linking into a large... well... Cluster of sites. The basic technology is C.O.T.S. (Commercial Off The Shelf) and is not rocket science -- antennas can be built for under ten dollars that way outperform commercial products costing tens of times more. The software is all open source and freely available and the hardware is cheap cheap cheap -- A full access node can be done for under $200 and a cluster member for about $50. Here are the folks from Bellingham WiFi:

The lunch was awesome as always -- the Salmon was a big hit but the other line was BBQ pulled pork sandwich with the vegetable slaw for $5. It rocked and I am still stuffed many hours later.