Thursday, August 2, 2007

Water Tower Move Creates Elgin Community Network Node


As TAN and EISD worked together to keep TAN's wireless network alive this summer, the group was tossed a difficult task, of migrating all the wireless users with as little disruption to service as possible. After a week of mounting and remounting gear, the MicroCell is complete and sports a new back haul to its existing downtown network. They do anticipate some small outage early to late PM as TXU powers off the power and moves the facilities. At that time we will remove the last facilities and start moving the wireless clients afected over to their temporary service Home: AKA Tower 3. Once the water tower is cleaned ( lead removal) and painted and power is restored we will restore equipment/service on tower.

The Tower3 facilities (upon approval) after completion will be converted into a community meshed network node, where mobile clients from the school district can use Wifi for short range VOIP wireless calls. The facilities will be refitted with MobileMesh technology to provide community network mesh formula. The community network will be given an interface to add, remove and bill users. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to a local community project for learning challenged children.

We are extremely happy to share technology and resources. We look back on the first labs we helped build in EISD, and how that one investment to me was priceless, and how it gave our youth a technical challenge - learning networking, web development and certified network certification upon completing proper testing. This program gave countless opportunities to several young people locally to jump into high tech industry jobs and even some use those skills even in our Armed Forces today.

As we look into the looking glass of technology we both feel that sharing resources can provide more information for everyone, and start working on redundant connections, bypassing local teclo related trunks and outages completely.

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