Hello 2010!

An Open Letter about the progress at Y-FI.

At this moment there are 2 locations up and operating. As you may know, Central Market is now completely covered by our signal and we have just recently brought online the Music & More by Williams Study Center on west Philadelphia St. The traffic on the Central Market repeaters is great and I can see that a number of people are making use of the system which is very exciting for us! We have had some great press in the newspapers and that has really increased our contacts.

We have meetings scheduled all over the city with people interested in helping push Y-FI forward. Meetings along Beaver Street; Meetings in the Newton Square Neighborhood; Along North George street and beyond…

This brings me to my question:

Right now we’ve been working to put nodes wherever people are willing to share and host them. Are there specific areas YOU would like us to target? (certain parks or certain streets or ???)  I’m asking because I want to start coordinating with partners who have offered support so that we can make that happen. I wanted to know if there were any places you, our users, thought we should specifically focus on.

So where is Y-FI headed?

Good Question – We want 2010 to be the big breakout year for Y-FI. I would love to see a healthy chunk of the Central Business District covered and possibly portions of the southeast neighborhood or other residential areas.  We could use a few downtown businesses who are interested in supporting Y-FI to contribute beyond the cost of the repeaters so that we can increase exposure and offset costs when we are trying to infill critical locations. Some of the corporate contributions have come from some of the very small businesses in and around Central Market and they have been very helpful but don’t cover the costs of implementing this kind of network. The costs of the hardware and the associated cabling and supplies as well as marketing materials is beyond what we are currently brining in. If anyone has any ideas as to approaching and securing some corporate donations I’m all ears. Their donation would come with large advertising exposure on our website that every user of our network would see. A corporate donation of $500 would make a very large impact in our small network, and several would enable us to blast out into 2010

I think that’s where we’re at for now. Big things are going to be happening in 2010 and am thankful for all of the support we have been given so far and the support people are lending in the future. I thought maybe this could be an open chain for questions, or discussion about where folks think it would be beneficial to focus effort in 2010. Feel free to comment back with your thoughts/concerns. If you are interested in seeing who is already supporting Y-FI you can visit our supporters page on our website.

Thank you to all those who have supported and continue to support Y-FI!