Wireless Outdoor Networks

Overview

Today there exist a lot of projects worldwide, using the WLAN-Technology, to realize wireless outdoor networks.
Most of theese projects are free and open network communities, but there
also exist some research projects with a academic or commercial background.

Free And Open Network Communities

All people take part in a network community connect themselves with wireless radios (like 802.11b). Theese networks are “open”, because anyone who wants to join the network can do so. They are called “free”, because all there is to pay is the necessary hardware and sometimes the sharing costs of a internet connection of a network member, that be can used by all members.
The history of such communites is described very detailed and interesting in the (german) book Freie Netze by Armin Medosch (Creative Commons Public License).

Network communities in …

Berlin

Friedenau/Wilmersdorf

Friedrichshain

Hohenschönhausen

Germany

Chemnitz

Wuermtal (Munich)

International

London (UK)

Portland (USA)

San Francisco (USA)

A lot more can be found at…

freifunk

personaltelco

A worldwide database for network communities is the nodedb

Academic And Commercial Research Projects

The DAWN project (Density- and Asymmetry-adaptive Wireless Network) is a research project being conducted at GTE Internetworking (BBN Technologies) and sponsored by DARPA Information Technology Office as part of the Global Mobile Information Systems (GloMo) program.
The goal of this project is to use wireless for military purposes.

Berlin Roof Net is a project run by volunteer students of the [http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de Computer Science Department at Humboldt University Berlin. The goal is to construct a network of nodes (access points) which share Internet access over wireless radio connections. The access points are run independently by the students with their own equipment.

The project was inspired by the MIT RoofNet project in Boston, USA.