Southampton Open Wireless Network
The Southampton Open Wireless Network (SOWN) is a non-profit community wireless network based in Southampton, UK.
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 of 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 the this building was linked to the ECS network via a VPN allowing students and staff access to the high-speed university internet connection. Due to university policy non academics are not allowed access to the university internet 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. At this point 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. This idea was never fully implemented. A solution to the low speed of 802.11b was to use 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 the 802.11a system 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 of 2007 ECS, wishing to provide pervasive wireless to the new students moving out of halls-of-residence, and into the local area over the summer, gave a sum of money to Dave Tarrant who employed Paul Dart, an undergraduate, to work on SOWN over 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.
Current Status
Due to the repeated failures of high speed wireless links and costs incurred most wireless nodes are now ‘SOWN[at]home’ nodes the majority of which are loaned out to people on a yearly basis. Despite this two nodes remain on campus connected via the university data network. It is planned for a third node to follow later in 2007.
SOWN[at]home nodes
Whilst any user can build/buy their own SOWN[at]home node as of September 2007 only the nodes described below exist. The nodes are purchased from Meraki and are identical to the Meraki Mini. Rather than running the default Meraki firmware the nodes are re-flashed with OpenWRT Kamikaze version 7.07.
Features
The nodes connect to the internet through an individuals home internet connection. They also use OpenVPN to connect back to a central server and provide connectivity between nodes. The VPN connection also provides the node with an IPv6 address taken from the University of Southampton’s IPv6 allocation. The VPN also provides both IPv4 and IPv6 multicast connectivity. The SOWN[at]home nodes are loaned out to people on a yearly basis.