Work meeting of the WISP-in-a-box project

The WISP-in-a-box project

Date

June 2-3-4, 2008

Location

Meraka Institute

Pretoria

Invited

People and organisations with an active interest in building a concrete product that helps bringing

connectivity to underserviced, underprivileged and overcharged communities in Africa.

Invitation list:

Steve Song / Shuttleworth
Rael Lissoos / Dabba
Henry Marnitz / Ndlovu Medical Centre
Kobus Roux et al at Meraka
Mark Summer, Inveneo (with request to forward to Ubiquiti)
Elektra
Mike Jensen

Budgets for travel, if needed, still TBC!

More proposals are welcome!

Agenda

Technology: Review of technical requirements and specifications

Review and finalize concrete low level Requirements / Specifications for WISPiab

Test and compare implementations
- Linksys/BookPC base test system (Meraka, Sebastian)
- Dabba implementation

Revisit the Data/Voice topic

Organization: Synergy and Cooperation

Advisory Group

We wish to form an advisory group / peer group, including the invitees of this meeting, but not limited to these.

Direct cooperation

There are several projects with similar agendas and significant overlap on the the technical layer.

Dabba
CuWin
WISPiab in the context of Wireless Africa, Phase 2
IP04 (it46, rowetel)
Inveneo platform

Primarily, within South Africa, there is the Dabba project.

The Dabba project focusses on the creation of a Village Telco (as in Voice Services Provider), while the WISPiab project puts focus on the general ISP operations, connectivity and ISP billing, creating infrastructure for a variety of services, with Voice being one of those.

The overlap on technical level is significant, in that both projects to a large extent draw on the same ingredients (e.g. OpenWRT and derived, CoovaAP, OpenSER on Software level, Linksys WRT54GL as current Hardware choice).

Taking into account the difficult human resources and skills situation in South Africa, cooperation on both technological and organizational level makes sense.

Identifying shared tasks the upcoming Tech Work Sprint at Dabba / Shuttleworth, June 16 - 20.

Business models

Review and discussion of valid business models and their implications on technical requirements
- What needs to be implemented in order to accomodate the various models - see e.g. http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php/WISPiab_specifications#Business_Models_.2F_Use_cases for a rough overview of topology implications.