Geeks Without Frontiers, an initiative of the not-for-profit Manna Energy Foundation, announced the final development of an innovative, low cost, open source, Wi-Fi software technology designed to bring broadband to all.
“By driving down the cost of metropolitan and village scale Wi-Fi networks, millions more people will be able to reap the economic and social benefits of significantly lower cost Internet access,” said Michael Potter, one of the founders of the GEEKS initiative. “GEEKS is honored to work with the Tides Foundation, Google and others in moving towards making the dream of significantly lower cost global access a reality.”
The initiative partners estimate they can develop and roll out large-scale mesh Wi-Fi networks for at least half of the traditional network cost. The technology is built mainly by Cozybit, managed by GEEKS and I-Net Solutions, and sponsored by Google, Global Connect, Nortel, One Laptop Per Child, and the Manna Energy Foundation.
The next step in the GEEKS project is to complete the current open source implementation of the upcoming IEEE mesh standard 802.11s, which is expected be ratified before the end of the year.
In addition to SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) secure authentication, the latest release of open80211s (o11s) implements the AMPE (Authenticated Mesh Peering Exchange) which enables multiple authenticated nodes to encrypt traffic between themselves and maintain high levels of security in mesh networks.
Related Links:
Geeks Without Frontiers – http://www.geekswf.org
The software is available at http://www.open80211s.org
