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Wireless Mesh

Municipal 802.11a mesh on light poles, backhauled from a city tower, with residential traffic tunneled clear of the government estate.

Also known as Municipal Mesh, 802.11a Mesh

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 7 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Designed the Cisco-partnered wireless mesh pilot with Cisco Systems and a city council member: an 802.11a mesh at 5.8 GHz, with root access points on an anchor community building and mesh nodes on municipal light poles, backhauled from an existing city tower over licensed-exempt point-to-point bridges to a centralized wireless controller.

Residential traffic was tunneled through the city firewall into a segregated educational-internet zone, so a public network never touched the government estate.

The mesh was also designed to carry public safety alongside residential access — gunshot detection and video surveillance on the same infrastructure — so one build served two municipal purposes in neighborhoods that needed both, and the cost case did not rest on broadband alone.

Applied in

  • Public Access Wireless Program2005–2019Fourteen years and four program names — JaxWiz, municipal Wi-Fi, public wireless, Downtown Wi-Fi — from inheriting somebody else's pilot to a signed, mapped downtown build still being extended four years later.
  • Digital Divide Broadband Pilots2012–2017Home internet for the lowest-income neighborhoods of Jacksonville, sited by demographic need rather than engineering convenience.
  • One Spark Festival Wireless2013–2015Forty-two access points in downtown traffic signal cabinets, backhauled over the fiber that runs the lights, with Ubiquiti mesh between intersections as the fallback and a tenfold internet burst for the week.

See also

Also searched as

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