Coverage and speed

Testing of an 8 router network

Once I had connected all routers I logged into the router to view the network topology. Here is what the page looked like.

Notes: All speeds were measured in kilobytes, using a single client at a time. In this case, the speed of my WAN connection is a consistent 500 Kilobytes, so anything less than that is overhead from the OLSR mesh protocol (self awareness comes at a price), wireless interference and the hops from router to router. In my opinion, the hops are the most significant factor in calculating overhead.

Wireless Coverage & Topology

Wireless Speed & Signal Strength

Testing of a 4 router network

Captive Portal Overview

Captive Portal Laptop Authentication

Both of the above networks are using the captive portal.

I turn on my laptop and connect to the wireless network. Once connected, I open a web browser. I am redirected to this page:

I put in my username and password.

I am authenticated against the worldspot.net radius server. The radius server notifies the chillispot process (running on the local router) that I am approved to use the network.

I'm fully online and able to connnect on all ports protocals. If I am idle for 5 minutes the connection will reset and I'll have to put in my username and password again.