When I started with wireless technology back in 1996 it was a need for a company to reduce recurring costs.  The cost was that it had many facilities and warehouse all located in a 20 Km zone.  Using statistics and trying to eliminate waste of the cost of wired networks, I came across many products that with a little capital cost would save the cost of many T1 connections.  All I had to do was put up a few antennas.

The need to get better networking and low cost was the need back then. Today with open source product of Locustworld the idea of having and sharing bandwidth with my friends and neighbours was the goal.  The DSL connection I had was and is very flakey.  

It wasn't until a year after I finished writing my dissertation on metropolitan area networks that I started to experiment with Locustworld.  In the dissertation I show that economic advantages would be in the area of ISP when the ISP was to use it own infrastructure.  I used technology examples such as, Free Space Optics as a backbone and Wireless as the last mile solution. 

Mesh was just being experiment on by a number of companies.  The one that caught my eye was Mesh Networks.  As I tried to contact them to buy some equipment I was told that they only deal with Tier one customers. 

I then came across and knew about Locustworld because of the posting of Jon Anderson.  After reading in slash dot new hardware that Locustworld came out with I thought I should give it a try. Once I started with 3 mesh nodes I saw that this could actually grow exponentially and that the dream of a Metropolitan Area Network using my own infrastructure could actually happen. A pretty big jump from 3 nodes to a whole city!

Almost everyone I talked with that starts Open Source Network is doing it from the grass roots up. Why the technology is still relatively new.  You hear everyday that Nortel, Mesh Network, Tropos, Belair, etc. are building out new wireless meshes.  You also here the problems of large municipalities trying to get into telecommunication. No body is bragging that the have  Metropolitan solution made.  No one is claiming best practices And the reason? We are all still learning. Oh even my own home town of Toronto E-city commission is trying to get into wireless mesh.  And everyone wants it and everyone is looking for leadership.