Making Public Wireless Happen
Matt Morgan, Concrete Computing, USA
http://www.concretecomputing.com
In 2004, for the opening of its new front plaza and grand lobby, Brooklyn Museum launched Brooklyn Museum Wireless, an integrated system providing public Internet access, networking for gallery kiosks and handhelds, and staff access to internal resources via Virtual Private Networking (VPN). The system covers the entire 600,000 square foot Museum and its grounds with Wifi coverage and cost, in its entirety, under $50,000. The system closes the loop between visitor and on-line content, for a fraction of the cost of creating the content, and therefore helps drive the Museum's mission. Many real and perceived issues of cost and complication, both technical and non-technical, create roadblocks to wireless implementation. In this mini-workshop we will directly address the technical issues, using off-the-shelf hardware with OpenWRT (http://openwrt.org) and WifiDog (http://wifidog.org), and discuss the non-technical issues, with examples from Brooklyn Museum.
Mini-Workshop: Public Wireless [Technology]
Keywords: wireless, wifi, remote vpn, kiosk, handheld
