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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.
why would you need 1000 ap's? arent these things good for at least 100 meters? just how big is CWRU?
...Cleveland becomes the world's spam capital.
This is the way I expect WiFi access to evolve. Fee paying (particularly at more than $1/day) WiFi hotspots will only survive in spots with limited access and one landlord like airports.
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
Are you on the grapevine yet ?
MP3 Search Engine
Don't abuse it. if you want to go kazaa-ing, go somewhere else. remember- when people are nice, and you abuse their trust, they tend not to be nice anymore.
Try to keep it to a dull roar, or use something encrypted at least. If you make it blatently obvious that you're doing any sort of mp3 swaping, the BSA and RIAA will rain the holy shitstorm of litigation on the school.
make sure if you use it, you write a letter of praise or something to the dean or head of IT praising their decision to make it open to the public.
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All the little nerds with the crimson Pringles cans
Singing Cleveland WAPS Cleveland WAPS
Living in Sin with a bogus MAC
Singing Cleveland WAPS Cleveland WAPS
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.
If low-bandwidth (and streaming things in gradually) would interest you, check into CDPD. When I was in Manitoba last summer, MTS offered always-on connectivity at $CA 40/month--in places where telephone lines were not available. (IE, very rural.)
There were two drawbacks:
1) Equipment outlay was about $1500
2) Bandwidth was not high. Theoretically 9.6 Kbaud, the higher latency and error rate than a wired connection reduced the throughput.
- a laptop with Linux/FreeBSD
- a WiFi card with reconfigurable ID
- assorted 31337 h4x0ring programs
- a ticket to Cleveland
Risk: 0%Profit: 100%
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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 run a College network, and the thought of any Tom, Dick or Harry being able to wander in and use my network for pretty much anything would be enough to give me nightmares for a month. Can you imagine the potential security issues there, or virus outbreaks? Cold shower time...
While I see wireless as a potentially flexible system, it is a security and management nightmare. We've banned our students from using their own wireless routers for just this reason.
At least as of now, when they say 'faculty, students, staff, and visitors to the campus', they really mean it. Presently, if you want to actually USE the wireless, you have got to VPN into the system. Until then, your computer will just recognize that there IS an access point, but you sure can't surf the net unless you've got an account with CWRU.
So maybe this isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Until i hear that anyone with a laptop can actually use the access points without going and talking to the school for access, i'm a little skeptical. It's still sweet tho, 'specially if you live on campus.
Hmmm... Call me a skeptic, but I seem to remember when Apple said .mac would be free forever too. Plus, just thinking about the security issues involved with such a large scale rollout make my gut wrench (and it's a pretty big gut...)
I'm looking in to mulitple phone lines and multi-channel ppp tunneling to Toronto (where my servers are hosted), then hit the net from there.
DSL is a couple of years away at least here (rural (very rural :) northern Ontario), I can get about 20 Kbit/sec out of a phone line so 5 or so of them should do it. This is strictly business use (ww.com, camarades.com and the wwgrapevine.com) so I'm not too concerned about the per month cost if it is not something exorbitant.
The most frustrating part of all of this is that there is a perfectly good fiber running a couple of miles from here !
MP3 Search Engine
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.
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...
This just arrived:Eerie coincidence? I think not!
Trolling is a art,
As a lifetime resident of Cincinnati, all I've got to say is:
Don't you realize that some people could be looking at pornography on their laptops now???!!! And they might even be Democrats !!! Somebody oughta be arrested!!!
:sighs:
Yet another score for Cleveland in the ongoing struggle. Better bars, better bands, better baseball, better weather, and a significantly smaller proportion of troglodytes among the population. At least we've got race riots, and, uh... Larry Flynt. Though we're trying to put him in jail. Again.
Y'all got any room up there?
hang brain.
I can understand why they don't want most of that...but banning NetBEUI?? WTF? That's the best way to windows share over a LAN...I guess they like having gigabit ethernet but not being able to share files over it (netbios also banned). Weird.
Instead of free wireless internet access for all, how about free weights for all? All this does is benefit fat asses house-sitting their computers outside. "Going outside to take a breath of fresh air" will mean sitting on one's ass outside all day.
On one side, fat nerds will stay outside longer than before, but this time using their computer exclusively, instead of just talking a walk in the park. Good development? No.
On the other hand, the rest of us will have to put up with the eyesore of these people outside thanks to free wireless internet. Next, sound polution from the speakers. Thirdly, smell polution from these same people. Talk about a triple threat!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
This service is not free to the public. You must have a CWRU (now officiall called Case) network ID to join the Cisco VPN.
Just for interest, how does CWRU handle this problem (preceding /. story. I presume that 1,200 staff, students, and random strangers constitutes quite a serious home-grown network...?
I suspect a large part of the answer is to treat mobile users as "foreign" and put them all on an external segment of the network where they simply can't do much damage except possibly to each other.
Does anyone have more information?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Okay, here's a primer for all of you with Mod points... he's being sarcastic yet still making a point. I mean really, does Slashdot only give mod points to the people who rode the short bus? Just because you don't find a paticular piece of sarcasm funny doesn't automatically means it is a troll post. And if you live in denial that the RIAA and DHS won't be trying to scan this network, then I guess you would believe this is a troll post.
... 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.
As for the tuition gripe, yes it is true that tuition has gone up, and that some of that money has been spent on trying to better the school and increase its name recognition. But tuition has gone up across the board, so the CWRU increases are nothing special- I'm willing to bet that they were less than the Ohio State tuition bumbs percentagewise. Secondly, the money spent on name recognition and the like seems to be working- here is this wireless network construction on Slashdot's frontpage.
So all in all, while Case will have its detractors, I think it is an up and coming institution. Trying to break new ground does not come cheap, and success is not guaranteed, but the spoils of achievement are well worth the risk.
It's like the Cleveland Freenet is rising again.
-ae506
Idol Star Astronomer
They modify the phones for out-bound calls only, or in the worst cases, simply shut the phones down.
...would I be involved with this. CWRU better have a trunkful of lawyers and/or a Microsoft "We ain't responsible" EULA. We have an "open" network at my university, but you have to register your machine. Cloned MAC addrs are the only threat and if you are some little shit who sets a static IP, we have a nifty little script that pings IPs, and bans you on the router. As for security, there is none. Better used encrypted means. That is the user's problem.
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...
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.
Oops. s/authoritative/not authoritative/
Sorry about that. *blush*
As nice as it sounds, I think this is just another of Case's money sinks, like the (indescribably ugly) Peter B. Lewis building. ( http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/lewis/ ) They have updated the recommended systems ( http://www.cwru.edu/support/guide/info/specs.html ) to include wireless cards, but from my experience, most people will go with desktop models. When I was there, I wouldn't have been able to use it, and neither would most of the people I knew. Like many examples of high-tech gadgetry, it sounds great until you stop to consider how few students or faculty are actually going to use the service.
Everyone knows that Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is the world's largest wireless network campus in the world, even though it's beta noir, and long time rival, National University of Singapore has implemented a wireless network waaay before those crummers even thought heard about 802.11b. :-)
More than mere navel gazing.
so that's why our tuition shot up to $24,000 a year.. so that Case (formerly CWRU) could make the slashdot headlines. (estimated cost of attendance is ~$34,000 btw)
This will be great for CWRU wireless PDA users that can't run VPN software on their PDA. There's no good VPN software for Palm OS (Handspring) that works with the CWRU VPN right now.