Home
About Us
Colocation
Community Wireless Networks
What and Why
About Community Wireless Networks (CWNs)
A community wireless network (CWN) is an intranet for your geographic community, with one or more connections to the global internet. CWNs grow with communities - when two neighbors purchase one DSL link and share it using a wireless link between their houses, they have just built the smallest possible community wireless network. Even better is when ten neighbor households share two DSL lines and a cable modem line over a mesh wireless network, while using a virtual whiteboard (in the form of a wiki) to supplement their in-person neighborhood communications.
Why CWNs?
We believe that community wireless networks can simultaneously help bring geographic communities closer together while connecting them to people and resources all over the world. Municipal wireless networks, centrally-maintained cousins of community wireless networks, are growing in popularity - but they're prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. In contrast, CWNs can be started with a fairly small investment (~US$300-$500 and some time) and grown household by household.
We have begun to collect information and test solutions so that our members can build CWNs by deploying their own community wireless network nodes.
Collaborative Efforts
Cernio Tech Coop
If you'd like to collaborate with us on these efforts, please email inquire@cernio.com or join our discussion list.
Existing Community Wireless Networks
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Project (Illinois, USA)
SFLAN (San Francisco, California)
SoCal Free Net (Southern California)
Consume.net (London, England)
Personal Telco Project (Portland, Oregon)
Related
BAWUG - Bay Area Wireless Users' Group (San Francisco Bay Area, California)
NYCWireless - advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless Internet access in New York City and surrounding areas.
How-To
Guides, Books, Documentation, and the like
Model Muni-Wifi Policy
"[T]his model Privacy Policy for the Silicon Valley Municipal
Wireless Network carefully balances the interests of law enforcement
and commercial success with the need to protect users' privacy when
they use the network."
cyberlaw.stanford.edu
Wireless Networking in the Developing World
a practical guide to planning and building low-cost telecommunications infrastructure
January 2006
www.wndw.net
Building Wireless Community Networks, Second Edition
By Rob Flickenger
June 2003
www.oreilly.com/catalog/wirelesscommnet2/
O'Reilly Network: Wireless DevCenter
a wide-ranging yet generally high-quality web resource for all wireless tech
www.oreillynet.com/wireless/
Ingredients
Software
m0n0wall
An open-source FreeBSD-based firewall/router distribution with an
excellent web GUI. Fits on a 32MB compact flash card, but can also be
run on a conventional hard drive.
pfSense
A port of m0n0wall, with many more features such as failover, load balancing, etc. Requires a hard drive.
LEAF
A Linux-based functional equivalent of the other two.
Wifidog
A suite of captive portals.
Hardware
Soekris Engineering (Northern California)
EnGenius Technologies (Southern California)
PC Engines (WRAP) (Switzerland)
