Rain!

Its been hot - arid almost - here in the Mearns whilst we put our test antenna up and started receiving fast broadband here. So its with some relief that during the current Sunday-Morning rainstorm our network - kept running. As we anticipated. But it's always good to see actual proof. 

On another note, our backbone wifi-network is basically complete and stable now - some devices have been running continuously for 19 days now. A power cut earlier in the week affected two of our subscriber sites, but all appears well. 

Today, we placed orders with our distributor for the router, authentication, authorisation and accounting kit, and our final end-consumer kit. 

Basically, we're using a MicroTik Routerboard 1100 for our core routing, authentication, authorisation and accounting services. This unit is rated 'hard core' and should easy allow us to put as many subscribers as we like on it. The end-consumer stuff is a new  MicroTik RB951-2n box, which gives us end-point encryption and PPP services to the main router. As well as providing subnet, DHCP, DNS, etc, to the end-consumer, on wired as well as 2.4ghz wifi networks. A very neat, compact solution.

What this means is that each consumer site makes a tunnelled PPPoE connection back to the main router, which will then unpack and route it over multiple ADSL and 3g connections to the internet itself. All very smart, and all very secure. We're running tests on this kit later this week, and should roll out to our existing test consumers after we're happy with the configuration and testing. 

Finally, we invested in a Radius server and billing software specifically tailored to a Wireless Internet Service Provider, so we should be able to concentrate more on providing a good service than keeping the accounts up to date.