High Speed Secure Wireless Internet Access
and Location Services in Public Places
The Choice Network is available at the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, Washington.

Retired, June 14, 2002
To the best of our knowledge, the CROssroads Wireless Network (CROWN) was the first free public area wireless hot-spot network in the world. At a time when the community was touting 3G networks, CROWN showed how WiFi could be used for ubiquitous Internet access. Our network supported global authentication, network discovery, user mobility, differentiated services, last hop security, and location / context services. The edge-server design and the accompanying protocols have been picked up by working groups within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and by many companies as part of their world-wide hot-spot deployment. The centralized switch architecture for enterprise-wide Access Point deployment can also be traced back to CHOICE/CROWN. The New York Times covered our project on public area WiFi networks in Feb. 2000. CROWN provided Internet access and location services for a little over 2 years and was retired on June 14, 2002.

The Crossroad's mall continues to use our equipment and provide free wireless access. Check it out here

All you need to do when you enter a public place that offers the CHOICE network is to Configure your wireless LAN Card, get a passport account, check your proxy settings and point your web browser to http://Choice.