Revision as of 11:37, 17 July 2012

Introduction

DeepSouth covers Hout Bay on to Kommetjie and on to Fish Hoek.

There is a specific CTWUG IRC channel for DeepSouth called #ctwug-DeepSouth.

History

DeepSouth started as a personal experiment between Hout Bay and Kommetjie with Aragon installing a 12 km link between himself and a friend. Its success escalated into him soon making contact via WiND with other potential Hout Bay wuggers. After a handful of Hout Bay meetings, Aragon put the first Hout Bay access point, Kush, live in March 2010, and helped the first 3 wuggers to get connected. Hout Bay and Kommetjie were isolated from the rest of CTWUG, but the network had its own DNS and DC services from day one. Life was good.

During the course of 2010 Hout Bay and Kommetjie gained some more users, but at the same time pmurgs started a network in Fish Hoek along with a connection to CTWUG via Rage in Gordon's Bay. Fish Hoek's growth was game changing, and led to the establishment of TheFarm high site in December 2010. Its position allowed Slangkop in Kommetjie and pmurgs in Fish Hoek to peer, and so made Hout Bay and Kommetjie official nodes on the CTWUG network. The DeepSouth moniker was coined sometime in 2011 to refer to our still growing, co-operative community.

Equipment

DeepSouth uses predominantly Ubiquiti equipment compared to the majority of CTWUG using MikroTik equipment.

The reasons for this come down to two factors:

• DeepSouth's geographic isolation from CTWUG give it no reason to ignore MikroTik alternatives.
• In 2010 when DeepSouth started, Ubiquiti radios were technologically superior to anything on the MikroTik platform from a purely RF standpoint, as well as being vastly cheaper and simpler.

Today Ubiquiti has lost its RF performance lead somewhat, but AirMax still outperforms MikroTik's Nv2 in certain cases. MikroTik did, and always will have much more functionality and modularity, but it comes with a higher cost and greater complexity. Ubiquiti provide a software SDK which allows its firmware to be greatly enhanced, but its not enough to match all of MikroTik's builtin functionality, although at the same time provides some functionality not available on the MikroTik platform. At this stage Ubiquiti sectors and client devices are the best tools for the job in DeepSouth, but MikroTik's use on back bone links is starting, and might grow.

The sectors at the highsites in DeepSouth use Ubiquiti radios running dual polarity 802.11n on 5 GHz with Ubiquiti's proprietary AirMax protocol. As a result, client nodes are required to use Ubiquiti 5 GHz AirMax equipment to connect. Many of the high sites use ethernet-only MikroTik Routerboards for their routing functionality.

Administration

Hout Bay

• Kush - Aragon
• Vertex - Aragon

Kommetjie

• Slangkop - Georg, Aragon

Fish Hoek / Sun Valley / Capri / Noordhoek

• Pmurgs - pmurgs
• TheFarm - Beetle001, pmurgs
• Ewers - Dmon, pmurgs

People

Note: YELLOW denotes ADMINISTRATOR.

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