[SATLUG] Deli owner wishes to set up own hotspot cheaply

[Brad Knowles]

On 9/1/07, Mary Yatti wrote:

>  I'm looking for the most inexpensive way to set up
>  free wifi for a deli in a rural area of Bandera.

Dunno about your uplink capabilities, but the folks at Less Networks 
have put a package together that they've had a lot of interest in. 
You can subscribe to their service for a fee and get hardware and 
support from them (pre-configured with their software), use their 
software and support on your own hardware (also for a fee), or just 
use their software package on your own.

Of course, for that last option you won't have the back-end 
facilities that Less Networks provides to help you make your hotspot 
more friendly and saleable, and it won't be as easy to integrate 
advertising into your landing page, but everything is based on 
open-source software and what they're really selling is the back-end 
services and support, so you've always got the option of just taking 
their software and doing the rest on your own.


The Less Networks folks are doing all the back-end operations for the 
Austin Wireless City project, and my understanding is that all the 
other major wireless city projects are also using the software 
configurations from Less Networks, although they're providing their 
own back-end operations facilities.

At the very least, it won't hurt to take a look, see 
<http://www.lessnetworks.com/>.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>