Community Wireless groups from around the country will be gathering this weekend, for a Wireless workshop hosted in Southampton by SOWN.
Highlights include:
* Presentations from wireless groups
* Discussion sessions on security, antenna building, meshing and the consume website
* Warcrawling
* Antenna shootout
So far people from the following groups have confirmed attendance:
* Consume.net
* Broadband Wight
* Feeed
* Wessex Broadband
* Consume@Reading
* Bristol Wireless
* Manchester Wireless
* Kirby Hill
The weekend promises to be educational, and recreational: warcrawling = WiFi + pubcrawl
It's a bit far to travel, but if you're interested in joining me, then give me a shout.
For those of you who couldn't make the meeting last Tuesday, there is another WiFi event in Manchester on Wednesday the 15th.
It's being held at the circleclub, with various factions of the Manchester WiFi scene descending for a drink, a chat, and a couple of presentations. I'm told there will be a healthy mix of suits, governmental bods, and techno geeks, so it should make for a lively evening.
Presentations are being given by the myzones.com CEO, and the guy behind whalleyrange.org
You can find the circleclub roughly here. Doors open at 6pm with the presentations starting at 7pm.
A meeting in the Southern half of Manchester is now long overdue, so Tuesday 7th we will be meeting in the Ducie Arms at 7:30ish.
The pub is on Devas St (just off Lloyd St North), behind John Rylands Library.
An A-Z map can be found here
The pub is reputed to be wirelessly enabled, so bring along your wireless toys, your questions, and your enthusiasm for solving the worlds problems with WiFi.
The silly season is now well and truly over, and the manchesterwireless effort is getting back on track, with at least one meeting planned for this month. Stay tuned for details of the meeting in South Manchester next week.
WiFi coverage in the mainstream is continuing to grow [did somebody say Centrino?]. This week Radio 4 devoted a whole 30 minute feature to wireless hotspots & the community wireless phenomenon. The program involved some interesting titbits on EastServe.com [a wireless ISP based in East Manchester], WiFi on planes, trains, and beaches, and a cameo appearance from James Stevens of Consume.net.
An archive copy of the program is temporarily available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/shoptalk/ram/shoptalk.ram
Also, on the other side of the pond, SeattleWireless.net are now branching out, with their own tv station - a great example of what is possible with community wireless networks. The station is also available on the internet, at http://tv.seattlewireless.net This months broadcast has an interview with Rob Flickenger, who literally wrote the book on "Community Wireless Networking".
News coming in from freifunk.net [a community wireless gig last month in Germany] report of the very funky looking 4G cube - "4 cm cube sporting up to 4 radios, smc type antenna connectors, a 400 Mhz mips 32Mb flash 64M ram, with power over ethernet and usb, currently running debian" - One for the future perhaps....
