blogs

Urbana, IL, June 22, 2004 - After two years of extensive planning and debate, the City of Urbana voted yesterday to fund the acquisition of wireless equipment necessary to connect half-a-dozen sites in the downtown area to the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN). The proposal will fund wireless connectivity in several indoor and outdoor areas along with the nodes needed to connect these areas to CUWiN infrastructure. CUWiN is providing its labor pro-bono and none of the city funding will go to CUWiN.

The proposal to fund $18,600 in equipment purchases for this proof-of-concept project will come from the city's 2004-2005 fiscal budget was put forth by councilmember Danielle Chynoweth.

The City of Urbana's vote to approve this measure follows a larger trend in Urbana that demonstrates the outstanding community support from businesses and organizations alike for wireless networking. OJC Technologies, the Acorn Active Media Foundation, the Urbana Free Library, the Urbana Business Association, and the University of Illinois have all lent their support for the community networking initiative.

About CUWiN

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has built a communications network using wireless networking equipment. This is essentially the same "WiFi" equipment used in homes and offices, but CUWiN puts it on rooftops to connect neighbors and form a high-speed community network.

CUWiN's three-part mission is to:

• connect more people to Internet and broadband services;
• develop open-source hardware and software for use by wireless projects world-wide; and
• build and support community-owned, not-for-profit broadband networks in cities and towns around the globe.

CUWiN is a program of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. OJC Technologies is CUWiN's development home.

For additional information, contact:

Sascha Meinrath
Project Coordinator
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
(217)278-3933
sascha@cuwireless.net
http://www.cuwireless.net/

June 15, 2004
The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, Prairienet, and Free Press invite you to join us for a national Community Wireless Networking Summit August 20-22, 2004 in Urbana, IL. Making the Connection: The 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks will focus on grassroots action, impacting national regulations and policies, and building a coalition of local groups, researchers, policy leaders, decision-makers, and community activists.

It's time we organized to take the public airwaves back from corporate interests. Community Wireless Networks offer more services for cheaper prices and are owned by the communities that deploy them. Anyone interested in making the "public interest" the number one priority in our wireless telecommunications infrastructure should definitely attend this summit.

Community Wireless Developers from across North America will be demonstrating cutting-edge technologies; researchers and programmers will discuss recent breakthroughs and developments; and policy-makers and funders will strategize with participants on how to launch new initiatives.

See the Community Wireless Networking Summit website for more summit information.

Registration for the weekend-long Making the Connection Summit only costs $30 for students and low-income, $75 for all others. You can register via the website.

Have questions or want to present? Let us know!

CUWiN has made its source code available online through SourceForge for external access. Updates to the Subversion repository automatically propagate to our SourceForge-housed CVS repository within 24 hours.

Via SourceForge, you can browse our source. The most important subtrees are for documentation and station images.

Use these commands to check out the sources anonymously:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wireless login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wireless co cuw-trunk

If you wish to submit changes to the repository, you need to send a patch to the CUWiN Development list, one of us will apply it to the developers SVN tree and then it'll automatically propagate within 24 hours to sourgeforge's CVS.

The CUWiN development team announces a snapshot release of our station images taken on May 11, 2004. Visit our download area to grab a copy. In addition to CD-ROM images this release also includes CompactFlash images and updaters for previous installations.