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CWRU Opens Largest Wi-Fi Net
server1 writes "In what could be the largest public wireless service in the world, Case Western Reserve University is opening more than 1,230 Cisco Aironet 1200 Series wireless access points on September 1, providing free Internet access to faculty, students, staff and visitors to the Case campus and University Circle." Good news for Clevelanders looking for some free wireless internet access.
University of Akron's also got very good wireless coverage, and they push laptops rather heavily. It was so terribly convenient. I'm not going there anymore, alas... I miss it. The speed was really blazing, and nothing compares to the ability to actually be online looking up information related to your lectures while they're happening... can make for a much greater understanding of the material.
:(
Alas, my current school has some kind of fledgling deal going on, but so far I haven't even been able to get it to work, and they aren't very good about providing information on it.
I don't really see how this is news. Purdue has a good 1600 access points on campus and have total coverage in all the buildings and are working on open space coverage now. Any student/staff member can use it free. Here's our coverage map: http://www.itap.purdue.edu/airlink/WirelessCurrent 3.pdf
I don't know about CWRU, but my school has a lot of stone and brick buidings. 2.4GHz doesn't go 100 meters that way. Even a class room of people could suck your power way down.
Last time I've checked, Drexel University in Philadelphia held this wireless title, not to mention the fastest Internet link of any university. When an announcement touts a school like this with "could be" instead of "is" makes me suspicious that they worded it in a way that could either allow what they're claiming to be false, or they didn't bother to fact check to confirm its validity.
Anyone know more about where Drexel weighs in? Kind of a silly pissing contest, but having the Best or Fastest (blank) for a school is good marketing.
The goal is to make most of the Cleveland area to have free WI-FI available. The Playhouse Square are also just went wireless for free (www.cleveland-freenet.com)
While I do live in Cleveland, and on a whole don't care for the city much at all, University Circle and the CWRU area are great, home to some great museums and probably one of the most culturally diverse areas in the metro area. Your sad attempt at subtle racism just sucks. Get back to the lilly-white suburbs where you belong.
I often work from home on my company-provided laptop. It's been my dream to work from a Starbucks or, in the case of Case, the locally-owned, thirty-year-old Arabica coffee shop. Hell, there's even a bar on Case campus I could probably work from!
NOTE: This is not at all an informative post. I'm just gloating. >:-)
It is interesting to see CWRU do this, as Ohio State likely would never dare try this. At Ohio State, all systems connected to the network must authenticate their users. If a system is unable to do so, the network switches typically force users onto a logon server in order to verify whom they are.
This is a result of OSU's network policy (PDF file - see item #13). There are a few exceptions, but for the most part this is true.
OSU's wireless 802.11 service requires users to login, and pay for some sort of dialup plan. Even the $1.95/month one counts.
There is a small article in the latest Wired (Sept 2003, pg. 34) that states exactly this. "The way to cash in on wireless: give it away".
--
George
The implication here is that CWRU's network is publically accessible. At last check, Drexel's network was *not* publically accessible (MAC locked, IIRC).
Of course, things may have changed and I could be wrong...
But they can already, most likely. Where are your Ethernet ports? If someone just plugs a laptop into one, what will happen? (On most networks, the DHCP server will issue the laptop an address and the "intruder" can go about his/her business merrily. To actually prevent random people from using the network, you'd have to actually authenticate the people whenever they use it, probably with a VPN. Remember, MAC addresses can be spoofed easily.) How is this different with a wireless network, aside from not needing to find an Ethernet port?
To really achieve security, you need a segmented network with firewalls between that don't trust anyone more than necessary for them to do their work. And if you're worried about traffic being captured, encryption. (Either a VPN or application-level encryption like SSH and SSL.) I don't really understand how wired or wireless changes that.
This year was the first year we've had two vlans in our residence halls - one for the residential network & one for wireless access points in the residence halls. Unfortuneatly, XP has made it really easy for students to bridge the two networks together and wreak havoc for us. Tracking down the bridging machines is a nightmare.
We're currently 3com core (cb9k) to edge (3300s & 4400s), but doing a fork lift Cisco core replacement this winter. Hopefully life will get better when we replace the core, but this has been the roughest semester start we've seen yet.
Unfortuneatly I'm primarily the Linux guy & not the network guy... I don't know of an easy way to track these monkeys with our current equipment. Any brilliant ideas?
The campus at Akron has over 1000 access points for full coverage in and outside of buildinds. I know of other universities around the US (Tulane, UofTenesee) that also easily have that many as well. As you start doing the site planning the numbers of APs can easily start to add up. The 1000 number for Case does not seem unrealistic to me.
At CWRU you have to register your MAC address for your wired network cards in order to get a IP address on the regular LAN. Otherwise you get an IP in a different range with limited access. With wireless, you are on a separate network and must VPN in to the regular campus network LAN.
I am not intimiately involved with the project, as I work in the EECS department at Case and not ITS. However, I do know a lot of people that *do* work within ITS and keep myself informed enough to know that most of what's being spouted here is inaccurate at the least and FUD at worst.
In any case (no pun intended), here's what's going down.
Case currently has deployed 600 at last count (a few months ago) Cisco WAPs with 802.11b. By the end of the project, almost 1200 WAPs will be deployed campus wide. When Cisco starts shipping the 802.11g radios for the Aironets, all of the radios in all of the APs are going to get upgraded to g.
OK. That's done.
Next, currently it is REQUIRED that anyone wanting to use the WAPs must authenticate to a Cisco VPN server and gain access to campus network services as if they were physically on the network. HOWEVER, starting September 1st, ANYONE will be able to use another SSID on any WAP to gain access to the network AS IF they were outside of the CWRU firewall. ANYONE. Script kiddies, goofballs, terrorists... your mother... anyone. Also with that, though, are some SERIOUS controls and, I would assume, monitoring of the traffic. The first big control is bandwidth throttling. No, you wouldn't be able to park (if you could find parking at least) outside of a building and snarf down kazaa bullshit (besides, Kazaa is mostly throttled for everyone anyway. P2P is such a waste of resources, but I digress). So don't think you're going to be able to pull down at 4 to 5 Mbps on the "guest" network. What you WILL be able to do is check mail, browse the web and do activity and most "normal" people would be able to do. If you want to do high bandwidth wireless applications, you'd have to use the VPN.
So, while this is authoritative I believe I can speak with some certainty that what I have said above is correct and true.
Also, I want to state that my words here are not necessarily the official views of my employer, Case Western Reserve University and are my own based upon publically published information.