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Re: [Sheflug] Wiki links wanted (Dinnington.net + Plone event)



On Wednesday 14 March 2007 09:54, Jan White wrote:
> Richard,
>
> Where did Dinnington get the money to setup a free wireless network?
> Any chance Sheffield has any good ideas like this in the pipeline?

Please let me help here...

The money for this came from Objective 1 and The Big Lottery. It took several 
years and an enormous amount of volunteer effort to put a proposal together 
to make this work. It is now almost a Wi-Max network, with Wi-Fi connectivity 
at street level backed by high speed wireless point-to-multipoint 
connectivity from our community data-centre to key buildings in the 
communtiy. 

The project began from a community web site business I started called 
living-in.co.uk. This gained great support from the community, but access to 
the internet was then extremely low among the local population and I was 
unable to develop the business further. Nevertheless, I decided to do 
something about it and at the same time to base the whole project on a free 
software platform. I was also determined that the community should own its 
network infrastructure to give it the chance of succeeding on a volunteer 
basis.

The wireless coverage has been hampered by delays in planning - most notably 
gaining permission (recently granted) to site an antenna on a prominent local 
Church. However, we are now managing to reach around 90% of our priority 
targets and once the Church antenna is in place we should be able to reach 
out to other nearby communities. We are presently waiting for someone who is 
prepared to scale the outside of the tower using a bosun's chair - 
interesting times!

The project includes a bank of servers based on Ubuntu, making Linux desktop 
applications available to the anyone in the community using NX. This works 
from anywhere, but performance in the wireless coverage area is excellent. 
There are some caveats though - disabling screen savers on the server 
sessions being an important one we have recently discovered!

We are presently working on extending this to include local streaming of 
audio / video. The wireless network is well suited to this and several 
Sheflug members are involved in making this work.

Although funding for the project officially finishes this June, the internet 
backhaul is financed for a further year so the network will continue to 
provide a free wireless internet access service to the community while a 
self-financing model can be developed.

You will have realised that the web site is based on Plone. I have just posted 
details of a Plone Skinning / Accessibility event on 21 March at SHU - 

http://www.dinnington.net/dart/plone-skinning-and-web-site-accessibility

Please feel free to come along, but let me know.

As far as other bright ideas are concerned, there is a major new project 
taking shape called Digital Region...

http://www.digitalregion.co.uk/

This will have a major impact on networks such as Dinnington.net, but it is a 
little early to say exactly what!

HTH.

Bob Holland
-- 
R E B Holland CEng FIET
Bradwell IT Solutions Ltd
Sheffield S25 2QS
Phone: 01909 568630 Fax: 01909 567825
http://www.bradwell.net/

Travelling to South Yorkshire & need somewhere special to stay?
Throapham House B&B offers five star guest accommodation in a convenient rural 
location.
For more details see http://www.throapham-house.co.uk/

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