Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Lawrence Freenet has offered to donate $750,000 to create a wireless network that would allow free Internet access to University of Kansas students.
Joshua Montgomery, founding member of Lawrence Freenet, said the organization had been talking about ways to provide coverage at the University since Freenet was founded. He said if the idea was approved, the University could use the money to expand the “Jayhawk” wireless network.
“It would take KU from a university that’s three to four years behind in coverage and turn it into one of the first universities in the nation to provide coverage to its students anywhere in the city,” Montgomery said.
Montgomery said students would be able to use their KU Online ID and password anywhere in town to access the Internet, eliminating the need for students to subscribe to monthly Internet services that cost anywhere from $15 to $50 a month. He said there would be a small fee to the University to cover the cost of service technicians and customer service operators.
Montgomery said Freenet’s goal as a non-profit organization was to create universal Internet access, rather than trying to restrict it by charging as much as possible. He said that each paying customer helped to cover the cost for low-income families. He said the deal with the University would enable Lawrence Freenet to provide service to between 1,000 and 2,000 low-income customers.
James Heaney, Topeka senior, founded the KU Wifi Club to build student support for Freenet’s proposal.
“I think there would be a huge demand,” Heaney said. “I don’t know who wouldn’t want free Internet.”
Montgomery set up a Web site that will soon have a petition for students to sign to show support for Freenet’s proposal at http://groups.ku.edu/~wifi.
Bill Myers, director of assessment and outreach for the Office of the Vice Provost for Information Services, said the University was working on building an independent wireless network on campus with a $2.6 million initiative in collaboration with Student Senate. Myers said Lawrence Freenet had not submitted a formal proposal to the University yet, but that Information Services was in the process of fact finding to discover whether Freenet’s offer would work.
“The goal of providing wireless access to the Internet for KU students from anywhere in Lawrence is admirable,” Myers said. “KU’s Information Services is exploring the viability of doing so in the manner suggested by Lawrence Freenet, but no determination has been made and nothing formal is being considered at this point.”
Paul Knorr, general manager for Sunflower Broadband, said wireless Internet connections were less stable than wire line services. He said if the University found a need for wireless access, Sunflower Broadband would submit a bid for the contract.
— Edited by Elizabeth Cattell
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Comments
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
Yea Freenet! That sounds very promising.
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
Freenet has come a long way, but still has a way to go.
I talked to J.D. Heaney and he said that Freenet is going to make additional service improvements over the next year.
Sounds great to me, no more overage charges with Sunflower. Last month I paid $30 extra for streaming TV (Heroes rocks).
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
Free internet at home just for being a student? Nice.
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
Paul Knorr, Hardy Har Har!
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
Freenet promises much, and delivers very little, at least in my experience. For the $30/month I paid, I received download speeds of 500-700kbps (that's kiloBITS, not BYTES), well short of the "up to 7mbps" advertised. More troubling, however, were the constant outages in service - with connection cutting out once every couple hours or so for 5-10 minutes at a time.
They do get an A for customer service, as all my calls were handled well, and they were frank about the ongoing process of upgrading their network. But until every last upgrade is complete, and the entire network is speedy and reliable, Freenet's promises are not worth the everyday experience. How their infrastructure would handle the additional load of 5,000 students using Myspace, YouTube, and P2P, I have no idea.
Lawrence Freenet offers to create free wireless for students
We are aware that the current data service is only about 60% of where it needs to be. (see the press release related to this article at: http://www.lawrencefreenet.org/press/kuwifi.pdf ) We try to be honest about the performance and provide quality customer support.
As with any organization on the cutting edge of technology, we do drop the ball sometimes.
Before providing service to the student body we are proposing about $1.5 Million in network upgrades. By the time the students begin to make use of the network we will have tippled the number of WiFi access points on the streets and increased the overall capacity of the network by a factor of 10.
The goal is to be able to provide 1 Mbps (1024 Kbps) of service under nominal network load. This is the point at which a majority of users consider the service to be adequate for general web surfing, streaming video, streaming audio, etc.
Thanks for the compliment about our customer service, we work hard at that. As we continue to build out the network I think you will find that the reliability and speed improve dramatically. A year ago today we only had 50 Access Points and 100 members, today we have 550 Access Points and over 1,200 members. In another year we will have well over 1,500 Access Points and are hoping to have 10,000+ happy members online.
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