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CWRU Opens Largest Wi-Fi Net

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the join-our-network-please dept.

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.

8 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Re:why so many? by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd say maybe they're using a superfluous amount because "1000 access points" has a nicer zing to it than "we have 462 aps" does, which may have been the actual number needed if it were based on how much area was needed to cover. Keep in mind, a lot of this is to impress people to attract attention, money and applicants to a school. Touting that number is more buzz-worthy than saying We cover X square feet. You hear that, and you think, "Hot-damn, that's a lot of access points! They must really care about network accessability when I'm on the go." Marketing.

  2. Re:Yay, Northeast Ohio! by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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. :(

    Just a little heads up to anyone who might be thinking of going there, living in the dorms and doing anything but web browsing on your computer:

    I just graduated from there this month. I agree, the wireless is good. Unfortunately however, they also put that campus-wide firewall in place that would make Hitler seem liberal. I'm in the computer science club there. I hear plenty of complaints from students who are trying to use the campus network for useful things (ie, services) but can't. Even some video games aren't playable.

    Certainly don't try making any special requests to the IT department. To them, the students are like a disease. I lived in the dorms my first three semesters there, before the network nazis put up the campus wide firewall. I very humbly requested a reverse DNS entry pointing to a hostname in a domain I owned. I got a very bitchy response back about how anything in 130.101/16 "represents" uakron.edu and it was incorrect to have PTRs going to any other domains. I then requested any DNS entry at all (because at the time they had no DNS entries for any dorm net addresses). After about a week they put one in place.

    Also, our student senate representative found out that they log all network traffic at border and store it for some time. If the RIAA or federal government ever comes a knockin', your ass and every bit of information they have on you will be in the sling faster than you can blink. You may have heard stores about universities refusing to turn student information over to the RIAA on request. Well, this is no such university, trust me.

    And then they had the nerve to apply this "technology fee" to our tuition, after making the network LESS usable than before.

  3. NOT free to public by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This service is not free to the public. You must have a CWRU (now officiall called Case) network ID to join the Cisco VPN.

  4. Re:Yay, Northeast Ohio! by Corvaith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There *is* access, allegedly, in some places. I get a connection in the student center, tried using it once, it comes up--in the web browser--with some kind of login screen, and then claims that my login is valid but that I'm not allowed to login without a 'secure' connection.

    I wasn't even aware that there were that many places to plugin to the network, though. I haven't been bothering... hard enough finding places with outlets to recharge in the middle of the day.

  5. I *STILL* have not forgiven CWRU... by Mhrmnhrm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... for taking down the Cleveland FreeNet (CFN). The grand-daddy of all freenets, it was taken down something like 2 years ago this month, ostensibly because they couldn't continue to maintain the dialup banks, or some such rubbish. The CWRU cash fund is supposedly something in the billions (though this may just be heresay), and I can't imagine that CFN really sucked that many resources out. SO... while this is all fine and dandy for the CWRU students/faculty tromping around the museums, the rest of us Clevelanders remain in the lurch with no real community site anymore.

    --
    I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
    1. Re:I *STILL* have not forgiven CWRU... by sinnergy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While I feel your pain, CFN did have some serious issues, the biggest of which was the fact that the codebase was insecure, the least of which was the fact that staffing issues within ITS prevented it from being properly maintained.

      Besides, and I think you could agree, in the end it really became a pretty seedy place with more and more 1337 kiddies joining in that really had no business being there. A great influx of people that really didn't care about the "community" trashed many of the SIGs and caused the IRC server to revert into a wasteland (albeit a wasteland I miss dearly, hence the reason for starting up my own IRC server at Case (the address isn't that hard to find and is well populated by Case people, alumni and other interested parties)). The MUC, it's successor, was no better.

      So while I do yearn for the "good old days" so often, after actually meeting and becoming friends with some of the people that ran it, I understand a lot of the reasons why it simply had to go. It was a bitter pill to swallow and I understand now that the issue wasn't a black or white one... it was very gray indeed.

  6. They don't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They modify the phones for out-bound calls only, or in the worst cases, simply shut the phones down.

  7. CWRU=Cleveland Freenet back in the 90's... by SirDaShadow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone remember back in the day when they used to give away free accounts? They weren't shell accounts, but you could do email, news and IRC. This was back in 1990, and basically that's how I got my feet wet on the internet. Good ol' times I reckon...