WISPiab work meeting 200806

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Revision as of 08:56, 21 May 2008 by Sebastian (talk | contribs)


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