Fenway/Mission Hill Pilot Network

openairboston.net is currently building free WiFi networks in the Fenway and Mission Hill neighborhoods of Boston. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of building a community-driven citywide network using advanced low-cost hardware and open-source mesh networking protocols. The Fenway/Mission Hill network is funded by the Timothy Smith Network and will be free for anyone to access.

Fenway/Mission Hill Pilot Team

Gabriel Fishman, Project Manager
Prior to joining openairboston, Gabriel Fishman spent a year serving as an AmeriCorps*VISTA at Castle Square Tenants Organization in the South End of Boston, where he managed a WiFi network for a 500-unit housing development. Gabriel also started several programs offering free computer repair and computer training programs for low-income families. Previously, Gabriel worked in IT and research for a foundation in Hartford, CT. He attended Bard College at Simon's Rock.

Aaron Kaplan, Software Develpment, Network Design
A native of Vienna, Austria, Leon Aaron Kaplan studied mathematics at the University of Vienna and computer science at the Technical University of Vienna. A child of the internet boom, he has been a Unix user and programmer since 4.3BSD-Lite / ~ FreeBSD 1.x. Since 1997, Aaron has worked for major telecoms, IBM, ESA, banks and the oil industry mostly doing Unix consulting/programming. Aaron is a co-founder of the FunkFeuer.at, the first fully meshed, free wireless community network in Austria.

Aaron works at nic.at, the Austrian domain registry. There he is responsible for setting Austria's national Computer Emergency Response Team.

Sage Radachowsky, Technology and Installation
Sage Radachowsky has been working on wireless communication using Wi-Fi equipment since 2001, when he did the initial RF engineering and equipment acquisition for the Nepal Wireless project in the Himalayas. The project now connects thousands of people in dozens of villages. Sage has worked as a software developer, creating IT management utilities for the VAX/VMS and Windows NT operating systems. Sage has done electrical engineering for the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team, creating the main control board of the current car. He is currently working on control electronics for microbial fuel cells. He has been involved with OAB since April 2008.

Sage works as a carpenter in Jamaica Plain. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Connecticut. He speaks Nepali and builds small guitars.

Coverage Area

Fenway and Mission Hill are perfect proving grounds for a community WiFi network. The neighborhoods contain dozens of academic and institutional campuses, great public spaces and a variety of different types of housing, from high-rise apartment buildings to Boston's famous triple-deckers. Residents of these neighborhoods include students and families of every income level.

In the Fenway, our network will initially stretch from the Fire Alarm building on Fenway Road and Westland Ave to the Christian Science Plaza. In Mission Hill, the network will cover an area around the Tobin Community Center on Tremont Street, including the Mission Main housing development.

Click the maps for larger images
Fenway Coverage Overview Map	Mission Hill Coverage Overview Map

Community Engagement

In Fenway and Mission Hill, openairboston.net is committed to building a truly community-driven WiFi network. We are not out to create a faceless government or corporate bureaucracy that will dictate to the community what type of network they will have. Instead, we have decided to work with a variety of community-based organizations from day one to learn the needs of area residents and how we can address those needs.

The Fenway/Mission Hill network is largely a volunteer effort. Volunteers are playing key roles in the design and buildout of the network and they will constitute a considerable portion of our network maintenance and user support staff. By relying on volunteers, many of whom will be network users themselves, OAB intends on creating a self-sustaining team that is passionate about ensuring the success of our project.

Most municipal wireless networks, including OAB, use rooftop access points to provide street-level wireless coverage. While this approach may provide excellent coverage of city streets, it often fails to provide adequate coverage inside buildings. OAB's approach resolves this problem by supplementing the large rooftop access points with smaller devices that families can put in their windows to extend coverage within buildings. By repeating our signal to their neighbors, these families will be important contributors to our network and OAB is committed to developing a lasting relationship with them. We want to hear from our users about how our network is working and what we can do to improve it.

Finally, as a community-driven project, OAB will always remember that our mission is to provide important services to the neighborhoods we serve. Our users will have free access to a ubiquitous high-quality WiFi network. Our network will serve as a platform for innovators to develop and test applications of our network for the benefit of other users. One company might provide a wireless camera service that enables small business owners to watch their storefronts from home, for example. Finally, by combining free Internet connectivity with low-cost computers and computer training, OAB and partner organization's can implement a holistic strategy to bring new technology users into the Internet age.

Technology

OAB's Fenway/Mission Hill network is based on a backbone network of 4-radio rooftop access points developed by ADI Engineering. OAB flashes these access points with a suite of open-source mesh networking software, including the high-performance OLSR mesh-networking protocol. Our backbone nodes communicate with each other using 5.8GHz links. By separating the backhaul from the customer access side of the network we can dramatically increase performance and scalability. With our 4-radio router board, OAB has the flexibility to build a network to our specifications. We can add new capablities such as 4.9GHz radios in the future.

ADI Pronghorn Access Point

Any user with a wireless card can connect directly to our ADI backbone access points. However, our experience has taught us that a network built only with high-capacity nodes on rooftops will have difficulty providing coverage inside buildings in a dense urban area. As a result, we will also give out approximately 100 small open-mesh mini routers. These devices are designed to go into a user's window and will significantly improve access for users within a building as well as provide a means of connecting to the network for users without wireless cards. The open-mesh routers run OLSR as well as the open-source ROBIN firmware.

Open-Mesh Mini Router