Unwire PDX Watch

This is a follow up on an earlier post where I announced that an academic paper based on our coverage testing methodology had been accepted to appear at the Third International Conference on Access Networks in Las Vegas, Nevada (October 15-17, 2008). The final camera-ready version is complete and can be downloaded here. Our hope is that this venue will give further exposure to the methodology,...

In the June 20 Oregonian, Mike Rogoway reported that: "The company told city officials this week that it plans to start taking down those antennas July 1 and complete the work by July 30." However, there is no evidence as of today, August 1, that any SkyPilots or any other gear has been removed from the public right-of-way. Little birds have told me that MetroFi was looking to have the gear...

NTEN is putting on a panel session at the end of the month relating to wifi in Portland. The MetroFi experience will be included. Join with members of the Personal Telco Project, NTEN and the City of Portland to learn more about and discuss the history, progress, and future of municipal wireless. This is a great opportunity to hear about efforts like MetroFi and Personal Telco, as well as how...

On the evening of July 2, we took a little loop drive around the heart of what had been the MetroFi network. We discovered that, indeed, the network was largely gone, at least as visible in the 2.4GHz band. We did find an exception, however, when we drove along a promontory on the shoulder of Mt Tabor. We saw one SkyPilot still beaconing MetroFi-Free/MetroFi-Premi um. We consulted our...

Apparently sometime around 5pm this afternoon, the MetroFi network was turned off, sources say. For the last few weeks, the ads and splash page had been turned off, and today, a day later than they'd indicated to the press, the MetroFi-Free and MetroFi-Premium SSIDs apparently got switched off. We are going to make an brief foray this evening to confirm, but it looks like the MetroFi experiment...

For the last year or so, in furtherance of the educational mission of the Personal Telco Project as well as to satisfy our own curiosities, we have been seeking insights and explanations of some of the engineering decisions made by MetroFi. We requested speakers for the Personal Telco Project's monthly meetings from MetroFi via Denise Graab. Regrettably, despite some promises, we never got any...

Research based on the performance and coverage testing methods developed for our testing of the MetroFi Proof-of-Concept network in Portland has been accepted for publication at AccessNets 2008 which will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada in October. The paper is titled "Robust Coverage and Performance Testing for Large-Area Wireless Networks" and is co-authored with professors Dirk Grunwald and...