Introduction

The wireless community network built has to meet a number of requirements to be successful. First of all it has to be as ``open'' as possible to the users and to the developers. Being ``open'' enables anyone within the community to actively use the network and participate in the building thereof. Another constraint is that the network should be both reliable and low-cost. These constraints are met in this design using commercial off the shelf (COTS) and home built (low cost) hardware (network boards, antennas and PC hardware) components and Open Source software (such as Linux, FreeBSD and other packages well known to the Free Software community).