Guy wrote "have you used the Locustworld dual-radio mesh?"

until such time as Locustworld breaks out of its coma and delivers working 802.11g (and 11a) functionality on a competitive range of wireless cards I would question whether it's a credible player in today's market. Adding another radio, or using structured wireless backhaul, can help but the fundamental limit of about 6 Mbits/s of traffic on an 802.11b radio is a killer in today's marketplace.

That 6M has to do inter-node mesh traffic, end user uploads and end user downloads, all at the same time. How can an 802.11b mesh operator compete with 2M ADSL let along the "up to 8M" and "up to 24M" services becoming available. How does an 802.11b operator utilise one of these fast DSL services or bonded DSL as a backhaul from the mesh if the meshbox node it connects to has less capacity than the feed ?

Sitting back and waiting for others to come up with 802.11g card drivers while using an old Linux kernel version (2.4.20) doesn't impress me. I have an 802.11g Prism54 card running in master (Access Point mode) in a Linux box, off the shelf SuSE 9.3, what does it need to do to be capable of running a mesh system ?

The Locustworld mesh concept is excellent and the WIANA management tools help make it into a workable scalable system, but it is a skyscraper built on a sand dune if it continues to be limited to 802.11b.

Community networks are having to add 802.11g overlays to their systems using WRT54Gs and the like, to try an offer a competitive service and offer their customers faster speeds.

Have Locustworld lost the plot ?

Phil