Recently there has been a lot of interest in making high speed internet access available to rural areas. The CRCnet project has demonstrated that it is possible to build a high speed rural network using point to point 802.11b links. However a network of point to point links is not optimal for reaching large rural areas. Using the experience gained from building the current network the CRCnet project is developing a platform to enable the widespread deployment of rural wireless networks capable of supporting the next generation of high speed applications. This platform will be based on a mesh structure. The goal of this project is to design protocols and software to control nodes in a self-configuring mesh network.