Can our school broadcast a wifi bubble to allow extended access to our intranet.?

Question

We are a school in an urban area.A recent survey showed that around 30% of our pupils households donot have telephone landline or other means to access to the internet.

We have a robust intranet,with aVLE (virtual learning environment)accessed through personal loggin for each pupil.

Is it possible to set up somekind of wifi bubble,providing free wifi coverage for the residential area surrounding the school.The bubble would allow those pupils with out internet access to acccess their VLE out of school time.

We would need to limit wifi access to just the VLE to dissuade the general public fom using the service for surfing!

Can this be done?I have heard several towns in USA and Sween have already embarked on this type of project.

What sort of issues and costs would be involved?

we have a budget of around £70,000 for this kind of public access extended service

Answer 1

There are certainly places which have adopted this type of networking plan, but they are certainly costly, and not something to take lightly.

In the UK, Norwich has started making a public access network (but coverage is limited) and in Islington, they have an "electric mile" (or similarly named scheme) where the main streets are 'enabled'.

One ISP, Community Internet, was looking to provide wifi access to a small village (and was in the news, because there's a low limit on the number of users before licencing becomes quite an issue and cost). A search for Ray Bellis (Technical Director at Community Internet) might find more.



One real question though - if there are pupils who have no landline / internet at home, are they likely to be real "users" for this - if they have funds for a PC / wireless kit, then surely they also have the option of paying for a landline, even if the internet service is a spin-off of other things (like getting it free with Sky TV service)... I was just puzzled about the likelihood of not having a landline (which would be reliable, compared with the rather experimental / costly setup of such a wifi network.

Finally - you might want to contact the Mousemat show on BBC Radio Wales as I believe they carried a piece about some school with a network supplying service to local pupils too. It was over in the north-west of Wales, towards Bangor/Anglesey, perhaps.

Answer 2

Do a search on "mesh" networks I think you will find what you need. These aren't all that difficult to setup, you just need the spots to setup your "access points" which are also repeat units. You can contol who signs in and who has access from the "mesh" control panel. You can also set what sites are allowed on the internet side.
I dont now what the costs would be because it mainly depends on the size of the area you want to blanket with the signals. Each unit runs about 400-500 USD. The control software for many of them is "free".

You can get more details from http://defactowireless.com
or any mesh supplier.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

Yer it is possible you can do that but it will cost a bit of ££££££££££££££££££££££££