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100% open source Make sure you know what Wi-Fi you're using!
OpenWISP Wireless, Everywhere
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OpenWISP History

In the summer of 2008 the Province of Rome decided to start a free public Wi-Fi network to be spread over its 5352 SQ KM territory including Rome and 120 other cities for a total of about 4.5 million inhabitants. The main objective of the project, called ProvinciaWiFi, was to take a decisive step to reduce the existing digital divide by fostering and facilitating the use of ICT by citizens.
From the outset it was decided to commit the project to a completely open philosophy. For this reason a clear choice towards open software and operating systems and the availability of every modification, update and improvement to the community was made. The same approach was adopted for the knowledge and the experience acquired within the project. In order to pursue this goals the Province of Rome called the university consortium CASPUR to develop the technical solution. In this context, a research project conducted by the CASPUR consortium found its perfect application. This project proposed an innovative methodology for the distribution of networks (more precisely Virtual LANs used for Wi-Fi connectivity) between geographically distant sites.

The methodology adopted made it possible to host public connectivity services on non-dedicated network infrastructures (e.g.: private xDSL) that for technical and legal reasons could not be used as such.
This is not the sole advantage that the architecture developed by CASPUR and called at that moment OpenWISP, ensured to the Provinciawifi project: embracing the resource-sharing philosophy – typical of "open" projects – anyone can contribute to the network expansion simply by hosting an access point.

The benefits of the collaboration between the Province of Rome and CASPUR were not late to arrive: just after two months (i.e. December 2008) there were more than 50 hot-spots dislocated on the entire territory of the Province. Such a feature would have been practically impossible for the common architectures used for Wi-Fi networking, given the very rigid Italian regulatory laws in this matter.
In the course of 2009, a fundamental year for Provinciawifi network growth, the expansion requirements in terms of number of access points and increasing amount of service users, made it necessary to develop appropriate software tools to improve the simplicity and speed of Provinciawifi network management. The OpenWISP solution allowed the network to grow to include nearly 1000 active hotspots at March 2012 with the projection to grow to over 1200 by the end of 2012.



The software tools and the architectures, as previously decided, are now being released to the public free of charge with open-source licenses and as a complete stand alone open source project: OpenWISP.org.

Who is using openWISP?

Many Italian Public Administrations are using openWISP software for their Wi-Fi network.