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The Southampton Open Wireless Network (SOWN) is a non-profit student-led community wireless network based in Southampton, UK. Funded by the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, SOWN aims to be a research and development group for wireless technology. It also continues to aspire towards the provision of community based wireless broadband internet coverage for the city of Southampton. ==History== SOWN began as a project by the Southampton University Wireless Society in 2000 with the aim of providing pervasive wireless internet access to students on and around the University of Southampton. In October 2002 SOWN became a research project of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. The university provided funding and gave permission for two wireless access points to be placed on the university campus. A third was placed in the home of Mike Saywell so that the network could have access to the internet. The three nodes were linked using WDS. One of the nodes was placed on the student union building and the other at the northern end of the campus atop the ‘Zepler Building’. The node on this building was linked to the ECS network via a VPN connection; allowing students and staff access to the high-speed university internet connection. Due to the terms of the University's ISP, non-academics are not permitted to make use of this connection. In 2004 the network was expanded by adding a node on top of the 15 story ‘Faraday Building’ to the east of the campus. This node allowed line of site access to the main student areas of Southampton and a further three nodes in peoples homes were connected to the network. All the links in the network were wireless because the university would not allow unauthenticated traffic to pass over their network and at the time SOWN was an open network with no authentication. It was proposed that the network be secured using 802.1x authentication which would allow it to tie in with Eduroam and thus authenticate academics from around the world. In order to solve the problems of low speed attributed to 802.11b, SOWN proposed the use of 802.11a for high speed links between major nodes. By 2006 the node atop of Faraday was fitted with an 802.11a wireless card and aerial. Unfortunately, despite promising tests in the New Forest, 802.11a failed to transmit more than a couple of meters. This combined with several key members leaving Southampton caused SOWN to fall into decline. By the end of 2006 the only operational node was Faraday’s 802.11b access point. In May 2007 ECS, wishing to provide pervasive wireless to the new students moving out of halls-of-residence into the local area, provided Dave Tarrant with a budget. He employed Paul Dart, an undergraduate, to work on SOWN during the summer of 2007. At this point the direction of SOWN changed, rather than providing wireless links across the city small wireless nodes would be given to students to connect to their home networks and share their internet will other students. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Southampton Open Wireless Network」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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