Bristol Wireless

 By Sean Kenny, bristolwireless.net

Bristol Wireless is a not-for-profit social enterprise in Bristol, combating the Digital Divide through innovative projects and providing free and low cost services. Our first project, and still the main plank of our work, is a free to access wireless network.

The network has expanded over the last five years from the area surrounding one small community centre in the east of the city, to cover large areas of east, central and south Bristol.

Early days of the network

In the early days we allowed anyone to access the network, which while small and manageable at the time, meant that growth of the network proved to be very problematic.

Experimenting with routing across the network, and using different types of equipment to improve performance often made the network very unstable and at times unusable for many of our clients. Fortunately, they were very patient with the experimental nature of their free connectivity.

Support from IT volunteers

Over the years we have perfected, through trial and error, and large amounts of research and experimentation (by a small army of over-qualified and under-employed volunteers), a much larger scale network with several backbone nodes sited on tower blocks across the city.

We have also developed a much finer grained control of who can connect and how they connect that has increased both stability and reliability.

We can now actually sell access to commercial (or well funded) organisations, competitively priced against other business offerings. This allows us to subsidise the use of the network by smaller organisations and individuals.

Community IT projects

Recent projects have involved connecting a group of community organisations in East Bristol who were co-ordinating a community wide response to Neighbourhood Renewal.

We’ve also been working with local schools to deliver internet and refurbished computers to Year One classes in their own homes, and to trial very low cost thin client networks to children’s desktop computers.

We've equipped the last remaining "Wet" hostel in the city with Internet access (perhaps the least likely place to find it) and continued to extend the use of our network into Bristol’s most challenged neighbourhoods.

It's not just a case of sitting down with your laptop in the park and logging on though! (Although that is possible in a few hotspots).

Many of our users have received connectivity through carefully managed funded projects (thanks to UFI), which take a lot of planning for the rollouts.

Saved by the wiki

Casual network users don’t always find it easy (we insist they read our wiki'd documentation), but get a lot of encouragement and support and some even volunteer to help.

Even with that, it can be a steep learning curve, which is why we encourage the formation of similar groups in other areas of the city, such as Knowle West Web in the South, who we recently hooked up with to increase our network range.

Recycling computers

As well as the network, Bristol Wireless do lots of other stuff. We work with local recyclers to supply refurbished machines at very low cost (the machines all running our own optimised distibution of Linux which continues to evolve with feedback from users and clients, with volunteers contributing artwork and packages).
A fast internet ready box with 256MB of Ram and 17 inch monitor at only £50 - we think it's a bargain.

We have worked very hard on developing a thin client solution (LTSP or Linux Terminal Services) for small voluntary sector groups which can provide an incredibly fast, secure, stable and scaleable networked environment for the cost of a couple of a PCs.

We offer training, support and offsite backup for peace of mind, and groups seem very happy with the service, recommending us regularly elsewhere.

Festival wireless

In the Summer we have developed a sideline in IT support services for Festivals, bringing along a 12V LTSP suite of laptops that act as a mobile Internet Cafe, offering free wireless access to Festival goers and some infrastructure support, often in return for free tickets and some R&R for our volunteers.

At a recent arts festival in Bristol we were able to help provide live streaming of events over our network to other venues across the city in high quality audio and video as well as to the web and even into Second Life all in real time!

Passion for open source

Our passion though is the promotion of free software. We think that free software is software that respects our freedom. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.

We have many visitors to our offices in a friendly Community Centre who come to see and learn how an efficient, stable and flexible (and free) platform can work to support lots of different projects and lots of different kinds of users, and we meet many more people online in our 24 hour chat channel who we help and support as they take their first steps in the free software community. Come and meet us there.

www.bristolwireless.net