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News :: UCIMC |
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Community Wireless Network in the News: |
Current rating: 0 |
by St. Louis Post Dispatch, Jerri Stroud
Email: cu-wireless (nospam) cuwireless.net (unverified!) |
24 Mar 2004
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The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network made the St. Louis Post Dispatch today:
URBANA, Ill. - When Sascha Meinrath and Zach Miller began trying to share high-speed Internet connections in this university town, they used homemade antennas fashioned from Pringles potato chip containers, washers and lengths of copper tubing.
Three years later, they've graduated to weatherproof metal boxes containing a single-circuit-board computer, a wireless-networking card and a flash-media hard drive.
But the idea is still the same: They want to make high-speed Internet access broadly available to their community through a network of antennas and routers mounted on rooftops and chimneys of homes, offices and municipal buildings. Urbana is about 180 miles northeast of St. Louis; the University of Illinois is in Urbana and nearby Champaign.
The network, now named the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, recently got a $200,000 grant from the Open Society Institute to develop the technology and test it in a one-square-mile area embracing downtown Urbana... |
URBANA, Ill. - When Sascha Meinrath and Zach Miller began trying to share high-speed Internet connections in this university town, they used homemade antennas fashioned from Pringles potato chip containers, washers and lengths of copper tubing.
Three years later, they've graduated to weatherproof metal boxes containing a single-circuit-board computer, a wireless-networking card and a flash-media hard drive.
But the idea is still the same: They want to make high-speed Internet access broadly available to their community through a network of antennas and routers mounted on rooftops and chimneys of homes, offices and municipal buildings. Urbana is about 180 miles northeast of St. Louis; the University of Illinois is in Urbana and nearby Champaign.
The network, now named the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, recently got a $200,000 grant from the Open Society Institute to develop the technology and test it in a one-square-mile area embracing downtown Urbana.
The network has nodes, or access points, atop City Hall and the Independent Media Center Foundation, a community group that promotes social justice through Web publishing and a community radio station.
Miller, 27, and Meinrath, 29, have nodes on their houses and are starting to add more as interest in the project grows. Both men work for Acorn Active Media, a worker-owned technology collective, as well as for the network. Meinrath also is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois.
They're asking people who join the network to donate $10 a month.
In the next year, the Community Wireless Network plans to deploy 32 to 50 additional nodes on buildings downtown and in surrounding neighborhoods. The network will allow users to share publicly funded as well as private connections to the Internet, such as digital subscriber lines and cable-modem service.
But the network could run afoul of mainstream providers of Internet access. SBC Communications Inc., the local phone company in Champaign-Urbana, regards sharing a DSL line as a violation of its terms of service, said Larry Meyer, a spokesman.
The network uses some of the same technology as wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, but isn't the same thing as a wireless hot spot. Users must connect their computers through a wired or wireless network in their offices or homes.
Meinrath said he and Miller began dreaming about sharing Internet connections in 2000, when they were working at a school that had to shut down its computer lab for lack of money. Even when the lab was open, its robust Internet connection was in use only a few hours a day.
"We said it would be great if we could share this with the community," Meinrath recalled. But at that point, wireless-networking cards were expensive and scarce, and public hot spots for wireless Internet access were in their infancy.
Meinrath began working with hobbyists and others interested in developing wireless technology, using cast-off computers and other hardware. At first, they tried point-to-point linking of neighbors who wanted to share a digital subscriber line or cable modem. But that can't be scaled up easily to embrace a neighborhood or a larger area with multiple access points.
In the last two years, their volunteer developers produced software that would recognize new nodes automatically and configure the network to recognize them. But it didn't yet optimize the routing of traffic, nor did it provide for network mapping.
At that point, they decided to seek a grant from the Open Society Institute, a foundation supported by investor George Soros.
The institute decided to support the project because it has many potential uses in developing countries, where wireless networking often makes more financial sense than wired connections, said Jonathan Peizer, the institute's chief technology officer. He said the institute will work with the Urbana group to spread the technology overseas.
But the project also has great potential for Urbana, said Councilwoman Danielle Chynoweth. The network could help residents who can't afford their own high-speed connections get access to the Internet. She envisions use of the network in schools, businesses and at Urbana's seasonal farmers market.
"The Internet is like a road, a way for people to get resources and connect with each other," Chynoweth said. "We consider access to a road a right," she said, and soon that concept will extend to the Internet.
Urbana's city government is providing expertise and giving the network access to city buildings for testing and to boost its capacity in the downtown area, said Bill DeJarnette, information director for Urbana. The network could provide backup if other communications fail in the event of a disaster, he said.
Once the network spreads through the community, Meinrath envisions it being used for local Internet radio, local news groups and possibly telephone service.
Mike Lehman, an Urbana resident who likes to monitor radio transmissions around the world, decided to put a node on his backyard workshop in hopes of strengthening the signal from his wireless home network. He also will share his connection with friends who live about a block away.
Installing a node is fairly simple. Once the router box and antenna are mounted on a roof or chimney, a wire from the box attaches to an existing home network with a power-over-Ethernet injector, a box about the size of a computer mouse with jacks for Ethernet connectors. The box gets power from an electrical outlet. The router wire plugs into one jack, and a wire from the home network plugs into the other.
Security on the network is the user's responsibility. Meinrath and Miller said users will need to encrypt data they send over the Internet and use firewalls to protect confidential data in their own computers.
"The whole idea is that it's a community network," said Miller. "We want it to be open so anyone can use it."
Find out more
For more information about the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, go to its Web site, www.cuwireless.net
Telephone: 217-278-3933
Reporter Jerri Stroud
E-mail: jerristroud (at) post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8384 |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
