OrangeMesh Begins to Take Form

My name is Shaddi Hasan, and I’m one of the students working on the OrangeMesh software. I want to introduce our project here, and give a basic idea of where we are going. If you’re one of those get-to-the-point kind of people, you can just go ahead and go to our project page.

We’re putting together a “dashboard” control panel for a community wireless mesh network. A mesh network works by sharing an internet connection between a large number of wireless routers (”nodes”) that are located nearby each other. Using a mesh, blanketing an area with internet connectivity becomes really easy, and since a user has so many different nodes in her area to choose from, the network is quite robust.

Personally, I think the great thing about mesh is that a mesh network can be inherently community owned. In many “community” wireless projects, network maintenance is the job of a few technically inclined administrators, not the broad mass of the community. We’re out to show that you and your neighbors can control and maintain your own network, using wireless nodes that you personally own and servers you actually control.