Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Meshcube: A New Mesh-Routing Wireless Device

Posted by timothy on from the edge-cases dept.

jazzgroove writes "The Meshcube is a new wireless mesh routing device based on open source technologies. It's quite feature rich with support for VPN and IPSEC which come from the meshcube distribution. Apparently you can buy the device as a kit and build it yourself or buy it pre-built. For more information have a look at the wiki."

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Nice product - terrible price... by Shoeler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It makes Linksys' WRT54G look like an amazing bargain - especially because this runs a MIPS processor, has the same amount of RAM, and there's a (purportedly) bigger developer base for the WRT54G...

    And the Linksys can be had on ebay for $100.

    1. Re:Nice product - terrible price... by borroff · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And if I'm not mistaken, there are already a number of alternative OSes for the Linksys. Why not hack the linksys to add mesh features instead?

  2. Re:Okay, I get the idea by LondonLawyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pretty much what I was thinking. The 'London Wireless State of Play' story which was on Slashdot a few weeks back had some interesting geek density calculations which help explain why the Consume mesh project hasn't really taken off here yet. Kits like this need to be cheap to buy and easy to use so that they can become ubiquitous. This doesn't look to be either.

  3. http://www.soekris.com by puzzled · · Score: 4, Interesting



    Before buying a meshcube you might want to take a look at http://www.soekris.com

    I have two pairs of the Net 4511 machines as wireless bridges and a spare that I use for play. I've made OpenBSD fit into 16 meg of flash using the OpenSoekris script. There is a Linux based appliance type OS from http://www.mikrotik.com that also runs on the platform and it does all sorts of Magic(tm).

    This is an interesting announcement but Soekris has the track record to judge by the amount of talk about them on the wireless ISP mailing lists.

    --
    I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
  4. How does this compare with Nokia mesh? by Rick.C · · Score: 2, Interesting
    IIRC, the Nokia mesh network announced several years ago had enough range (at least several hundred meters) that even a few nodes sprinkled around a neighborhood could form an effective network. And they had an AP with a 10 Km range to get to the first node. Is the meshcube for neighborhoods or just for apartment buildings?

    At 100Mbps, the meshcube is faster than the older Nokia, but if the range is no better than a Linksys wireless router, I'm not sure what their market would be.

    --
    You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
    "Math in a song is good."-Linford
  5. Re:what is this used for exactly? by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Typical consumer-grade access points allow you to set up networks that involve a single wireless hop (from the client to the AP). Most APs don't know how to talk to each other wirelessly - if you want a bigger network than a single AP can cover, you have to string ethernet cable between the access points. This is frequently inconvenient, especially when the network spans a large area.

    Mesh networks use one of the many ad-hoc routing protocols (such as AODV, DSR, TORA, or DSDV) to decide the optimal path for each packet to travel (where optimal might mean shortest path, most reliable path, fewest number of expected transmissions, etc).

    In theory, they are also easier to set up.

    Also, having a "hackable" AP has benefits of its own - you can set up a captive portal, or a web server, or a web proxy, or a print server, or a file server, or anything else that might not come standard on a commodity access point.

    -jim