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A Community Wireless Network For Urbana	Current rating: 0
by David Young Email: dyoung (nospam) ojctech.com (unverified!)	18 Sep 2002
Community members are building a computer network to serve the Urbana community with local media, like UC-IMC, and broadband Internet.
This is an update to Peter Miller's story concerning the antenna we put on his house for a wireless computer network. Peter's apartment will be one station in a community wireless network that I am helping to build in Urbana, Illinois. I will explain what a "community wireless network" is. I will also explain how we plan to build one. A community wireless network is a computer network. It connects one computer---yours, say---to other---all your neighbors' computers. Computer networks are useful for personal communication, research, news, and entertainment. A community wireless network belongs to the community who uses it. That is, the equipment belongs to individuals in cooperation with one another, or it belongs to a co-op, or a unit of government. In this way, the community of users has a direct say in how it is run. Compare with the other networks you use, which you cannot control by withholding your dollars, let alone by placing a vote. Community control puts the "community" into "community wireless networking." But there is more to the "community" than that. A community wireless network also carries, without recurring telephone or Internet fees, the content and services that concern the local community. For example, if I, as a community member, want to share with you, also a community member, my gardening tips, or my political opinions, or my vacation photos, or church bulletins, or my homework assignments, I can provide that to you over the community network. This aspect also puts the "community" into the network. A community wireless network sends the signals that carry communications on the network by radio, hence "wireless." Building a network using wire or fiber optic cable is enormously expensive, because it involves renting space on telephone poles, negotiating for the use of "rights of way," burying cables underground, and so on. Using the airwaves, however, we are able to connect home to home for the cost of a computer and a special two-way radio that plugs into it. Most of the expense of building the infrastructure for networking goes away, because the airwaves are our infrastructure. Certain rules by the Federal Communications Commission reserve radio bands for high-speed data communications devices which you can operate without a license. Recent technological advances make such devices inexpensive to buy. This project is more than a year old. Let me tell you the history of it. Late last August, Sascha Meinrath and Zach Miller were inspired to build a wireless network for Urbana by news items they read on the Internet, which concerned groups founded for building wireless community networks in Seattle, Washington and other metropolitan areas. Zach and Sascha knew that between themselves, the people they knew, and the people they would meet, they had the technical know-how and organization to produce a wireless network in their own town. They made an open invitation for locals with an interest in computers and wireless to come to a meeting at Sascha's house. A small group emerged, with members who had diverse interests and experience. Right now, the core group consists of "software people" at the local office of Cisco Systems, at OJC Technologies, and at NCSA; a university professor who is making community wireless networking part of his curriculum; and a community organizer. Early meetings were concerned with building and testing antennas to see how far they would cast a beam of radio waves. Attendees discussed how to best connect several homes on Race Street to the Independent Media Center by "connecting the dots," the dots being homes, and the connecting lines being two-way radio links. Building the "Race Street Backbone," as it was called, was enormously educational. The group's sophistication grew with the experience of connecting homes on Race Street. They realized that if a homeowner and renter would host a station on the network, it would need to be as nearly silent and invisible as possible. They realized, moreover, that all the stations had to run the same software. Software upgrades had to be so simple that a station's host could do it in two minutes. Stations had to be reliable, but the network had to withstand single stations going off the air. Stations had to be inexpensive, meaning that they could not contain more than one $100 radio, and they had to be built from the class of computers that were available cheap or free. The network model that emerged is the model that Peter Miller's station embodies. Peter's station consists of a 133MHz Pentium computer with an inexpensive radio plugged into one of its expansion slots. Attached to the radio, with a cable resembling the one that brings cable television into your home, is the omnidirectional antenna on Peter's roof. A so-called "omni antenna" casts radio waves to the horizon, with equal strength in every compass direction. The omni antenna lets Peter's station connect with other stations within a few blocks of Peter's in any direction. We run Peter's station without a hard drive connected, but a diskette is in the floppy disk drive, and a CD-ROM is in the CD-ROM drive. The diskette/CD-ROM pair contain all the software to turn the dusty Pentium into a station on our network. The software is responsible for identifying neighboring stations and for relaying them the messages that carry Internet messages from home to home. The software on the CD-ROM also participates with other stations in choosing the best path, from station to station (to station...), for relaying a message from a sender (Peter's Web browser) to its receiver (the City of Urbana's Web site). For example, the "best" path---i.e., the shortest, fastest, and most reliable path---might be from Peter's station to Sascha's to Dave's to the City's station, Zach's station being omitted because it would needlessly lengthen the relay path. We will finish a small network which demonstrates the technology of an Urbana-wide network in a region a few blocks large by late this fall. At that time, we hope to have the funding to build a larger network, enveloping a several residences and businesses in downtown Urbana. A network covering Urbana will grow from the network downtown, station by station.
See also: http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display_any/7657 http://www.cuwireless.net/

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Latest News On Wireless
by David Young dyoung (nospam) ojctech.com (verified)	Current rating: 0 28 Sep 2002
Today Sascha and I climbed onto the IMC's roof to see if we could make a radio link with the station at Peter Miller's apartment building. And we did! This is exciting because IMC is a good place for the wireless network to connect to broadband Internet and Indymedia, of course.