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...