Welcome to LancasterMesh. An attempt at providing a cheap, resilient community wireless network to Lancaster.

We aim to provide a wireless cloud across the roofs of Lancaster, allowing anyone to join the network and become a node themselves. Nodes can either be simple repeaters, extending the range of the mesh, or gateway nodes giving the mesh a connection into the internet. With this wireless community mesh network things such as mobile hotspots and remote access are possible where no traditional wired access is available.

The hardware used is intended to be cheap and readily available. To this end Lancaster Mesh is using standard off the shelf wireless routers such as the Linksys WRT54G. Using this standard equipment along with an opensource firmware called OpenWRT, a node can be quickly built and put into play. These however, are not the only devices that can be used. Any old PC with a supported wireless card can be changed into a node using a bootable CD - it won't even overwrite any operating system on the hard drive. In fact a hard drive need not be installed in the PC. For more information on both of these, check the Documents section.

We have looked at a few different meshing systems before settling on the current one. Most are very good, but none of the ready available systems were quite what we were looking for. Ideally we wanted a totally self contained auto configuring system. To this end we have developed a custom firmware from OpenWRT and a custom bootable CD based on Linux. Both of these will have a version of OLSR installed which is a dynamic routing implementation. This turns a piece of hardware into a black box node system that should be just a simple plug and play. This is currently still in development and will either use a central database to manage the nodes, or IPv6 to ensure each node has a unique address. If you want to help in the development, please drop me a line at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ! Keep an eye on the News and Downloads sections for future developments.