Upgraded Old Town Wireless

For the past few months I have been working on and off to upgrade our aging and unreliable public wireless internet in Old Town. After researching many different solutions, I found that Meraki provides the best Public Wi-Fi solution available. Their model is the future of network technology. The management is in "the cloud" so I simply log into a website, configure my settings and add the device IDs. Then when I plug the devices into the network, it "phones home" and receives its settings (plug and play)! Since all of the devices update their settings automatically, I can configure multiple (even thousands of) devices in a single instance from anywhere with an internet connection.

The company that installed the wireless access points on our lamp posts in Old Town finished just hours before the Temecula Rod Run was set to begin. The new system was up and running just in time to provide everyone's laptops, iphones, and even ipads, wireless internet for the event.

The new wireless network name (SSID) is "Temecula Wireless" which is a change from the original of "old_town_wifi". I decided to standardize on "Temecula Wireless" for all City facilities with wireless internet to create a ubiquitous public Wi-Fi. Now, you can simply connect to Temecula Wireless once and you'll automatically connect at any other City facility with wireless. I will be changing the wireless network names of Temecula Pulic Library's "Library Wireless", City Hall's "Temecula City Hall", and the CRC's "CRC WiFi" over to "Temecula Wireless" this week (they aren't Meraki access points so it's a manual process for each device). Hopefully I will be able to add more Meraki units to additional City facilities so we can provide even greater free Wi-Fi access.

Here is a link to our status page for Temecula Wireless in Old Town: http://p8.meraki.com/network/TemeculaOldTown

Tip: I highly recommend connecting to our wireless in the Town Square right in front of the Temecula Civic Center, it's a beautiful view with a really speedy connection!

Picking Up Speed

For the past several months (year?) my time has been spent heavily involved with the new Civic Center project. As we are nearing the last stretch of construction and finally have a functional data center (other than some AC issues which came up today). We are beginning to install equipment and service into the new facility, here is a sample of what's to come.

Verizon installed Business Class FiOS yesterday. Here are the Speed Test results (via Speedtest.net).


Not too shabby, it beats a T1 (1.5Mb/s) I suppose. The current City Hall has a 4Mb internet connection, so it will be an over 10x increase for Download and 3x for Upload at half the price!

Thanks to a fiber link between City Hall and the Civic Center, which we also installed, I'll actually be able route our current internet traffic at City Hall through this new connection so we can start taking advantage of this new found speed ASAP. :)

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Alaska Video Blog

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