[Babel-users] Should I use wifi mesh routing in crisis situations?

[Valent Turkovic]

Hi,
my name is Valent and I'm founder of www.otvorenamreza.org which is a
partner project with Wlan Slovenia (we are neighbours) and also
www.meshpoint.me

We have used Babel for almost a year and it has show to be excellent,
recently we had tested it in real worlds situation with on extreme
sport event in which over 19,000 people have been online on 4 nodes
(each node with two 2.4 ghz radios)... in peak we had over 500 users
at the same time!

All nodes were wired, we didn't use wireless mesh, only wired mesh so
to say in star + hub and spoke topology.

I would like to ask this group what kind of setup do you use for
wireless mesh and which hardware?

We currently have mostly single radio nodes (tplink wr841nd and
ubiquiti nanostation Loco m2) in our network and by default all of our
nodes also run mesh on same radio but via adhoc interface.

In my short experimentation this showed to work quite poorly, even
with two nodes separated by only 10 meters on top of two building this
mostly failed to work and we had lots of connectivity issues. Once I
switched these two nodes to ap and sta modes link was rock solid.

We have few nodes that are connected to the network only via wifi
adhoc mesh interface but these are only border nodes, and they are not
so important if then don't work perfectly.

Did anyone experiment with running wireless point to point and point
to multipoint backone links with babel? Can you share what kind of
bandwidth speeds did you reach? Did you have any issues? Can you share
some best practices?

I would like to start using wireless mesh for connecting remote
MeshPoint nodes (www.meshpoint.me) so we can create bigger coverage
are during crisis situations when infrastructure fails and we can come
in and create popup infrastructure in matter of minutes.

I really hope we can all share our knowledge and help each others. If
you have any questions for me fire away :)

Cheers,
Valent.