Portsmouth Wi-Fi Planning Meeting

We met on Tuesday at City Hall. Here are some random notes/musings from the meeting.

This year's usership numbers are looking exceptionally strong. I'll report on them once we've had a chance to de-dupe and verify the numbers, but we're looking at another year of serious if not exponential growth, which certainly seems to validate our efforts.

We've now got a plan for how and where to install a mesh network with a handful of access points that would cover the key downtown areas. We're looking at phased implementation in that we need to install the "head" of the network first; that's the most difficult and expensive part of the process. Then, like hangman, we can add arms and legs to expand the wi-fi reach around town.

So the technical part is fleshing out nicely. As for the funding and "model," it looks like it'll be a hydrid of a few different ones. It appears there will be private sponsorship opportunities, perhaps as modest as $2500 (or the cost of one color print ad in a magazine, for example). These will fund our initial rollout. Our goal is to get the head in place about the same time that the kiosk hotspot shuts down for the winter. More details of course will be released when this becomes more official.