Wireless Leiden is a

wireless community network Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, NGO's and cooperatives in order to provi ...

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...

, Netherlands.

History

The Wireless Leiden Foundation (founded in 2002) set up a

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...

wireless network in

, the Netherlands, only with the help of volunteers, with some financial support by sponsors. The network is maintained completely by volunteers. The network is accessible free for everybody who wants to use it. This is possible because there are no expenses of any importance, as the volunteers who build and maintain the network do not receive any payment for their contribution and the materials needed were donated. The software used in the network is completely open source. Internet provider

Demon Internet Demon Internet was a British Internet service provider, initially an independent business, later operating as a brand of Vodafone. It was List of UK ISPs by age, one of the UK's earliest ISPs, offering dial-up Internet access services from 1 June ...

, donates free Internet access to the foundation. The Internet connection is, however, limited to the downloading of web pages. The network can be used at homes, schools and public buildings (like libraries). In many places in Leiden it is advisable to use an external antenna. In the city center, however, on most places a laptop antenna is enough to access the network. Wireless Leiden has been called one of the most advanced community Wi-Fi networks in the world. Wireless Leiden was published as a case study of a Wi-Fi based community network in 2010. Stefan Verhaegh of the

University of Twente The University of Twente (Dutch: ''Universiteit Twente''; , abbr. ) is a public technical university located in Enschede, Netherlands. The university has been placed in the top 170 universities in the world by multiple central ranking tables. I ...

analysed the "Wireless Leiden" case in his 2010 PhD thesis.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Wireless Leiden Foundation

Wireless Leiden Wiki

eGovernment case description
Wi-Fi providers Wireless network organizations Leiden