[CUWiN-Alert] Welcome & updates on the CUWiN project.

[Sascha Meinrath]

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the CUWiN-Alert e-mail list -- a low-traffic list whose purpose 
is to keep local CUWiN participants informed about the state of the 
network and recent developments that might affect service.  You've been 
subscribed to this list because you are either already hosting a CUWiN 
wireless node at your house or because you've contacted us with an 
interest in joining the network.

The CUWiN project has grown dramatically over the past year as more and 
more community members have become involved.  Unfortunately, that's meant 
that it's become more and more difficult for the CUWiN developers to 
personally touch base with everyone as we'd done during our first several 
years of existence.  Recently we conducted a survey of CUWiN users (thanks 
again to everyone who filled out the survey) -- one of the suggestions 
many people made was that we should keep folks more in the loop about 
things.  Thus, the creation of this list.  We plan to send regular updates 
to CUWiN Alert subscribers (hopefully not more than once a week, and not 
less than once a month).  As always, you should feel free to contact me if 
you have specific questions or concerns, notice that the network is doing 
strange things, etc.

Without further ado, here are the CUWiN UPDATES:

Our DSL provider recently cut off DSL service to all of its customers with 
little warning (in fact, our DSL lines were cut off even earlier then we 
were told service would end).  Not only did we loose Internet connectivity 
to most of the network, but critical components of the CUWiN network 
(e.g., our DNS servers) were also left unconnected.  We have been 
scrambling to replace these DSL lines and hope to have these changes made 
within the next week or two.

After nearly 5 years in development, CUWiN will publicly release our new 
software on February 1, 2005!  This software is a beta version, but fixes 
many of the problems that have caused network outages and slowness over 
the past few years.  We are in the midst of upgrading the entire network 
with a test release of this new software -- our goal is to have the 
existing network stabalized _before_ February 1st.

CUWiN has been gaining a lot of national media exposure lately -- the Wall 
Street Journal, The Economist, All Things Considered (on NPR), and many 
other news sources -- and will be discussed in an upcoming Mother Jones 
article.  It seems that much of the rest of the world is finally waking up 
to what we've been developing here in Urbana.  This is a very exciting 
time for us -- we're hoping to eventually merge the wireless system with 
the www.chambana.net project -- providing numerous additional services and 
applications on the network for local residents to use.

Stay tuned!

--Sascha

-- 
Sascha Meinrath
President                 *   Project Coordinator   *   Policy Analyst
Acorn Worker Collective  ***  CU Wireless Network  ***  Free Press
www.acorncollective.com   *   www.cuwireless.net    *   www.freepress.net