Iamatechie interviewed the open-mesh firmware developer Antonio Anselmi. We are publishing the summary to our readers.

1. What is your education/work Background?
I’m an IT Engineer and work as freelance System & Network admin, mainly on TCP/IP Linux platforms.

2. What is your role in the open-mesh project?
I’m the maintainer of the firmware

3. Can you say a few words about the team behind open-mesh?
We are a few team composed by people all around the world, other than me there are:
- Mike Burmensteir (from open-mesh.com) and Shaddi Hasan (from UNC Chapel Hil) working at Dashboard and at Orange Dashboard
- Marshal Dias (wifiCPA.com) is involved in the porting of coova-chilli
- Joe Bowser (VONI Vancouver) who merged his ruby-dashborad and wifidog captive portal solution
- Aaron Kaplan (OLSR team) is working to port OLSR into robin

4. What are your views on other mesh products like Meraki and MeshCom?
Currently Meraki has the best play in town: it’s a robust company with important collaborations with google, but we hope to grow in a few months. Meraki recently changed their politics with customers and “closed”
their device (look at their license agreement) so folk is very excited on our. Really don’t know MeshCom, I’m sorry.

5. If there was no open-mesh project, then what else would you be working on now?
IT stuff such as consulting, administration and so on…

6. What are the future plans for open-mesh?
Just in these days two big customers from Canada and UK have in plan to roll-out 10K nodes in this summer so our big goal is a stable release (beta-1.2) at the end of June: we all are working towards this direction.

We have solid contacts with Accton and this will allow us to have a better hardware (such as second integrated antenna, POE, GPS, Acton drivers,… ) in a month or two. We collaborate with Ubiquiti Networks too in order to release a pico-station with robin pre-flashed at the beginning of the summer (I’m waiting some samples from Ubiuiti to start tests).
About firmware we stay currently on top of Openwrt kamikaze 7.09 but other features are in plan according to new hardware (GPS first) and users requests… we are open!

Thanks

Antonio

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