Ozone's Presentation to EU- Mesh

Ozone presentation  French Wireless ISP Founded in  Goal : allow “Everywhere, EveryTime, Cheap and Effective connectivity” and build a pervasive network  Wifi was at that time the obvious choice for developing the network (cheap, widespread, flexible, no licence)  but Ozone is fundamentaly technology agnostic ...and bought in 2007 by Neuf Cegetel  Neuf Cegetel is the French second major Telco and ISP  3000 employees  Counts with 4M DSL clients (retail)  Important market share in Business clients  …To be bought by SFR, second French mobile Operator, within weeks…

Network logic (1)  Antennas on rooftops to provide a local coverage  We don’t pay for accessing rooftops : we gain access through individuals “offering” their rooftop in exchange of free access to our services  They also power the installation (~20 W)  5 Radio cards on each roof :  3 * 2.4 GHz (=3 * 120 °) for clients connections  2 * 5 GHz for backhauling functions  Multiply roofs to offer a full coverage of the city  About 1000 roofs to provide a first mapping of the city (105 km²) / Each roof covering ~ 200m radius circle  Full coverage provided through additional deployments (Urban furniture, lamposts…)  Backhaul roofs with efficient and affordable technology  Provide symmetrical Throughput  At least 8 Mb/s on each roof  Mainly Wireless Point to Multipoint using 5GHz (802.11a)  Free licences, good throughput, cheap hardware  Needs Line Of Sight (LOS) between roof and Concentration sector  …but also ADSL, Fiber, Wimax (when no LOS)

Network logic (2)  Each roof is connected to a concentration sector  Through a 5GHz link based on a  A concentration sector is a sector antenna connecting up to 8 roofs  About 25 Mb/s IP available at each sector antenna to dispatch among roofs  Concentrations sectors are located on high buildings in Paris  9 of these building today  Each building connected to the internet through fiber  Up to 20 concentrations sectors per building  Limited by frequency reusability  Each roof might connect another roof itself  Handy for sites that don’t have LOS to Concentration points

Clients  3 plans  18 € for unlimited monthly access  About 2500 clients each month  7,8 € for a daily pass  About 1000 clients  1,5 € for a 1 hour pass  About 6500 clients  About 10K users more at partners sites  Deal : indoor coverage and free internet access in exchange of roof access  Museums -Palais de Tokyo -Museum of Modern Art Centre Pompidou  Hospitals, Firms, associations

250 roofs Today’s network (01/2008)

Concentration Sector roofs Roof with no LOS Concentration Sector focus RSSI : RSSI > -70 dBm On both side.

DSL as backhaul  Standard DSL link used  Up to 20 Mb/s DL | 1 Mb/s upload  Tunnels used to hide the DSL layer  Allows to monitor transparently the roof connected  The user has no knowledge he is using a DSL link

A typical roof (1) Omni-directionnal Antenna (5GHz)‏ Sector Antennas (2.4 GHz)‏ Directionnal Antenna (5GHz)‏ Outdoor Case

A typical roof (2)

Concentration sectors Sector Antennas (5 GHz)‏ Directionnal Antennas (5GHz)‏

Hardware  Mikrotik Boards  RB532A (discontinued now)  MIPS architecture  64 MB SDRAM  3 Mini-PCI slots  ~50 % CPU load on concentration sector with high throuput (~15-20 Mb/s)  RB600  PPC architecture (400 MHz)  64MB SDRAM  4 Mini-PCI  « daughter boards » plugged to main board  To add Mini-PCI slots and reach 5 Wifi cards per roof  Wifi Cards  Atheros chipsets (AR5213 baseband / AR5112 RoC) a/b/g  Tests ongoing on n  Seems especially interesting for enhancing coverage in Ozone’s case  Antennas  2.4 GHz sectors (120°)  5 GHz sectors / directionnals / omnidirectionnals

Software  Mikrotik RouterOS  Handles Point to Multipoint topology nicely  Important in our Backbone to avoid the « hidden node » problem  No Open source philosophy here  A problem to integrate innovative solution  OpenWRT  On roof using DSL as a backhaul link  OpenVPN not well implemented on RouterOS

At the IP Level  All the network is routed  OSPF in the backbone  Up to concentration sectors  Then static routing  BGP peering with Tier 1/2 provider  FreeBSD server running bgpd and ospfd  QoS introduced  Assuming each roof has 8 Mb/s, traffic prioritization  Snmp, ssh  DNS, small packets (ACK), SIP  Web, mail  Other traffic  P2P  Problem is we don’t know actually what throughput is available at a given time on the wireless backhaul link  Authentification  Radius & MySQL databases  FreeRadius used  Proxy services offered to partners (T-Mobile, Neuf Cegetel…)

Operations / Management  Deployment  Made through Third parties contractors which have limited but necessary knowledge of the network  Implies they have a PC while deploying to verify antennas orientation, radio association, etc…  Monitoring and maintenance  SNMP Through Open Source softwares  Nagios for Network surveillance, availability reports, network instant trends  Cacti for graphing  Own developped tools for mass configuration / maintenance

Services  Services offered  Standard internet access  Throughput offered may vary according to the client's connection quality with the infrastructure and overall load ; goal is to provide 2 Mb/s symetrical  Telephony  SIP based ; we operate our own SIP proxies and have a PSTN connection through a business partner -SIP Proxies based on Asterisk and SER  We offer as well SIP transit services to partners (Neuf Cegetel mainly…)  About to launch  Geo-localisation services  Through IP based localisation : 200m precise in Ozone’s case  Through third party software : cf  “Mobility” services  Integrating various backhaul technology transparently for the users through tunnels -OpenVPN based (transparent to user) -Overhead might be a problem (up to 20% up to now)

Deployment relevant to EU-Mesh  100 lamposts in Paris  To be deployed end of May  Each lampost will be equiped with a 3 radio AP  1 * 2.4 GHz radio ( b/g(/n)) for clients connectivity  2 * 5 GHz radio ( a) for backhaul  Lampost might be backhauled by  5GHz link (Ozone network) ; majority of them  DSL link (directly or through wireless hop)  Wimax link  Goal is to provide seamless mobility for clients moving from lamposts to lamposts  In some area, we will deploy APs on up to 10 lamposts  100m distance between each lampost in these areas  Mobility will be checked with Surf and VoIP -Either through tunnels, or WDS  In the same area, different backhaul solution might be adopted simultaneously

Lampost deployment 5GHz PoE Ozone 100 m  EU-Mesh trials could be done on a portion of this deployment  Comparison of EU-Mesh and standard networks

Network flaws (some of them…)  Coverage is still low  A way to enhance coverage in a cheap and convenient way would be very helpfull  No Mesh in the network  Deployment could be a lot easier  Mesh network implying zero-configuration during installation would be a great feature for us  Auto-reconfiguration on failure would be a very interesting feature  Though our antennas are fixed, we have an Omni-antenna we could benefit from to enhance resilience in the network  Other hardware configuration could be studied and deployed to enhance resilience -Though major cause for outages in our network is power shortcuts  « Dumb » network  Poor QoS settings  Beeing able to locally manage QoS (based on actual Throughput) and have information on a full path (and not only a node) from a QoS point of view would be a very appealing feature  No interferences handling  Neither at 2.4 GHz nor at 5 GHz