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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 small investment (~US$60-$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)
Silicon Valley Wireless Users and eXperimenters (Silicon Valley, California)
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
December 2007
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/
Wikipedia: Mesh Network
good Wikipedia article on mesh networks
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_network
Ingredients
Software
B.A.T.M.A.N. (warning: site has a self-signed SSL cert, which will probably prompt your browser to give you a warning)
B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking) is a routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.
ROBIN
ROBIN is an open-source implementation of the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. It runs on hardware from Open-Mesh, Meraki, and others. It is built on top of the OpenWRT project.
OpenWRT
OpenWRT is a Linux distribution for embedded devices. It works well as a platform for mesh routers.
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. Does not support mesh as of this writing, but can work well as a standalone wireless access point.
pfSense
A port of m0n0wall, with many more features such as failover, load balancing, etc. Supports OLSR, which is an important ingredient for mesh networks. Has both hard-drive and embedded distributions.
LEAF WISP dist
A Linux-based lightweight functional equivalent of m0n0wall.
Wifidog
A suite of captive portals.
Orangemesh
An open-source management dashboard for ROBIN mesh networks.
Hardware
Open-Mesh
Providers of inexpensive, capable, well-regarded open mesh wifi hardware. Can run standard mesh protocols such as B.A.T.M.A.N.
(Oregon, USA)
Soekris Engineering
They design+produce+sell x86-compatible embedded hardware suitable for use as firewalls, routers, mesh wifi access points, etc.
(Santa Cruz, California, USA)
PC Engines (ALIX & WRAP) (Switzerland)
Vendors
Netgate
US-based vendor for all sorts of wireless networking equipment
Meraki
All-in-one solution. Closed-source and inflexible, but can be a good solution if one has more money than time.
