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Difference between revisions of "Mesh/FAQ"
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There are tons of moving parts to this project, most of them non-technical! We need artists and graphic designers to create flyers and infographics, people teaching classes and workshops on networking, folks mounting nodes on rooftops, community outreach volunteers, bloggers, photographers, documentarians, and everything in between and beyond! | There are tons of moving parts to this project, most of them non-technical! We need artists and graphic designers to create flyers and infographics, people teaching classes and workshops on networking, folks mounting nodes on rooftops, community outreach volunteers, bloggers, photographers, documentarians, and everything in between and beyond! | ||
=I already have an extra wifi router, can I use it for the mesh?= | |||
You _might_ be able to use it to extend the signal of your [[home node]] but we only support one model of router as the [[home node]]. This may seem odd since many people see OpenWRT as a way to re-purpose old hardware. We thought so too in the beginning, but after a couple of years of working on this it has become clear that: | |||
# New 802.11n Atheros-based dual-band routers are so much better than old hardware | |||
# Even fairly high quality previous generation Atheros hardware like Ubiquiti Airmax routers really underperform | |||
# New hardware is cheap | |||
# Having old 802.11g or 802.11b hardware on the mesh slows down the network | |||
# Supporting lots of different hardware is a lot of work | |||
We are now supporting just one good and affordable dual-band router as the [[home node]]. We are then working to support many different devices as [[extender node|extender nodes]] to extend the signal from the home node. This means that all nodes in our mesh will have at least two radios and many will have more. This fixes many of the problems that people bring up when they're talking about the down-sides of mesh networks. | |||