Mesh/Other mesh projects

The goal of this page is to list existing meshes, active mesh groups and failed community wireless groups so that we can learn from their failures and successes and possibly their source code and configuration parameters.

Wikipedia has a list of wireless community networks by region.

Active meshes

Freifunk -Germany

  • Location: Germany. Several cities.
  • Size: Over 600 nodes in Berlin and over 400 nodes in Leipzig according to the OSLR about page.
  • Protocol: Mostly OLSR, but some cities use batman-adv.
  • Map: Berlin
  • Note: Not one big mesh, but several meshes in several cities.

Freifunk is actually both an organization, a firmware and a whole set of meshes, some of them interlinked, mostly in Germany. We have a whole page about the project.

AWMN - Greece

  • Location: Athens, Greece
  • Size: Over 2400 nodes (according to their map, mid-2013).
  • Protocol: OLSR (according to the OSLR about page.
  • Map]

Funkfeuer - Austria

  • Location: Austria. Several cities.
  • Size: ?
  • Map: Vienna

Active non-mesh community wireless projects

Guifi - Spain

  • Location: Spain
  • Website
  • Note: Not sure if this is a mesh, but it seems to be huge!

Inactive / failed local networks

Archive.org's SFLAN - San Francisco

  • Website
  • Note: Not 100% sure this is inactive.

NoCat - Sebastopol, CA

NoCat's goal is to bring you Infinite Bandwidth Everywhere for Free.

  • Last news article was posted in February 2006.
  • Website went down some time in late 2012.
  • nocat.net on archive.org
  • Seems like it wasn't a mesh

One of the main organizers, Rob Flickenger, wrote the O'Reilly book Building Wireless Community Networks (published 2001). We should find him and ask him why it failed. His website is http://hackerfriendly.com