Commercial Grade WiFi Monitoring and Reporting

Forged in the unforgiving furnace of ladders and poles, Silver Lining's new monitoring systems for commercial ROBIN Open Source Mesh based WiFi network operators was built with municipal WiFi network operators in mind.  Want to know how many unique users per month your network has?  How about user activity throughout the day?

If you manage dozens or hundreds of ROBIN Open Source Mesh based WiFi devices and have Silver Lining installed, you'll be able to monitor almost a dozen different 24 hour metrics for your device.  This data is invaluable in troubleshooting that 10% of devices you have which require you to get out the ladder or the Hi-Lift occasionally.

These enterprise level features are now available to all Silver Lining users.  Paid users get an added bonus of reporting updates every 15 minutes.  So that when the next rock concert rolls into town and everyone gets on your network with their iPhones, you'll be able to see exactly how your network is handling the load.

Many thanks to Urban Wireless for providing feedback and testing of these monitoring and reporting features.  Several Open-Mesh and other ROBIN Open Source Mesh compatible devices such as the Engenius EOC-1650, Ubiquiti Pico-2, Pico-2HP, Open-Mesh OM1P, and Accton MR3201A will work with these features.

Posted Jan. 13, 2010 Comments (1)

Speed, stability, and new features for the holidays

 This week we released a firmware update which contains significant performance improvements for large mesh networks and a few new features as well.

Getting good performance and reliability out of WiFi mesh repeaters which are 2 or 3 hops into the mesh is challenging because of the lower speeds and higher packet loss associated with those nodes.  These latest Silver Lining modules for the Open-Mesh ROBIN firmware contain optimizations to speed up the delivery of web pages across the WiFi mesh.

We think your users will appreciate the speed improvements. Our beta testers certainly do.  This feature isn't available on the base firmware right now, only if you have Silver Lining installed.  Imagine that - pages get served faster with ads than without!

We've also delivered a gift for our paid users right in time for the holidays.  The 'Advertise Here' link in the ad bar can now be set to a page on your website as an alternative to the merchant gateway.  We know that smaller network operators will appreciate this to provide a more personalized approach to advertisers.  The Merchant Gateway will still be there for you when your network grows and you need to hand off the grunt work to our systems.

Stay tuned for the next post, we have another gift for our large network providers which you may wake up to find in your holiday post.

Posted Dec. 23, 2009 Comments (0)

Silver Lining contributes Commercial WiFi Stability to Open-Mesh firmware

Open-Mesh.com recently announced a new stable version of the ROBIN open source firmware.  Silver Lining has made major contributions to this firmware release, bringing the firmware to a commercially capable mesh WiFi platform for wireless internet service providers.

Here are some of the major features Silver Lining Networks has contributed to this latest firmware release:

• Updates to the OLSR route analysis code so that the firmware can support large scale mesh networks with hundreds of nodes.
• Improved the link quality measurement code to be accurate in odd mesh configurations.  Certain mesh configurations with 2 and 3 hop nodes now report link quality to a high degree of accuracy.
• Optimized the auto rescue code so that it can recover from any situation.  As with every mesh network, nodes occasionally become orphaned from the rest of the network.  Nodes will now reliably be able to find nearby neighbors and reconnect to the network even in the most extreme connectivity issues.
• Configured the Linux kernel so that devices could be upgraded over the air.  No need to climb up poles (or roll out the basket truck) or make trips out to nodes for upgrades.
• Contributed code changes to prevent devices with lossy connections from overloading when network calls to the dashboard could not be completed.
• Several additional smaller changes that resulted from over a thousand hours of Silver Lining testing and development on existing large scale commercial WiFi networks.

With these changes, Silver Lining has brought the reliability of the Open-Mesh ROBIN platform up to the level of commercial solutions such as Meraki, Aruba, and Ruckus.  Additionally, Silver Lining's software adds certain additional enhancements designed specifically for commercial grade WiFi networks.

Coupled with the low cost of the Open-Mesh hardware platform, Silver Lining has made it possible to create profitable advertising supported and branded WiFi networks for niche networks that were previously cost prohibitive, such as Municipal WiFi.  Where you previously had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to implement a commercial WiFi mesh solution that had limited methods of recovering revenue, you can now implement a branded or advertising sponsored commercial WiFi network with Silver Lining at a fraction of the cost.

Visit www.slwifi.com to learn more about how you can run a WiFi network that is stable, scalable and profitable.

Huge thanks to the crew at Urban Wireless for beta testing these new features.  Thanks also to Mike, Antonio, and Marek at Open-Mesh for making this platform possible.

Posted Dec. 2, 2009 Comments (0)