Participant Internet



Burning Man IT provides city-wide public access to internet via non-wifi radio technology. Anyone with modest computer/network skills may purchase cheap, readily available hardware from major online vendors in order to receive this non-wifi signal and turn it into wifi or ethernet at their camp. While we try our best to provide great service we do not guarantee any specific level of service in terms of bandwidth, latency or uptime, nor can we offer any support. Participants themselves help each other with access to the Participant Internet. 

 

To participate, you need to have a specific kind of microwave radio, mount it in your camp, aim it at our main tower, and keep it powered. This radio acts as a router and DHCP server and has a wired ethernet port but does not create wifi. You can simply use the internet it provides via its ethernet connection or add your own wifi router for wifi.

 

The radio we recommend is the Ubiquiti NanoBeam AC Gen2
It is small and somewhat resistant to the high winds. It's available relatively cheap from Ubiquiti's website as well as Amazon, ebay, and other online outets. 

Other compatible devices include:

 

Instructions

  1. Reset your NanoBeam to factory defaults. The easiest way to do so is to power up the radio, wait one minute to ensure it is fully booted, then hold down the reset button on the device until the lights change. Hold for 5 seconds more, then release. 

  2. Plug your laptop into the LAN port of the PoE injector. Give the laptop the static IP address 192.168.1.21, netmask 255.255.255.0. Open a web browser and go to http://192.168.1.20/ . If it's a device with old firmware, login as user ubnt, password ubnt. Devices with newer firmware will prompt you to create a username and password. Do so. You'll need to remember both for about 10 minutes. Go to the System tab and check your firmware version. If it's older than 8.7, visit https://ui.com/download to download the latest firmware for your specific device and then upload it to your device. Do not disrupt power or cables during firmware upgrades; otherwise your device could be damaged. 

  3. After the login page refreshes, login again, click on System, scroll to the bottom and click on Upload Configuration. Upload one of the configuration files below, depending on your location. 

  4. Aim the radio visually toward the tallest tower in Center Camp, near the Cafe. The sector antennas are mounted at about 40 ft (2/3 up the 60 ft tower). For finer aiming, connect to https://172.16.0.1 , user name “installer”, password “installer”. Click on the Tool logo in the upper right and select Alignment. Numbers closer to 0 are better. 

  5. Connect switches and access points to the ethernet port of the radio. The radio acts as a router and gives out DHCP leases out of a pool. 

Configuration Files

Mailing List

Join the mailing list brc-wifi-list@burningman.org for updates.