Shameless plug: My company Althea (<a href="https://althea.net" rel="nofollow">https://althea.net</a>) is making router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward.<p>We have 2 networks live, one in rural Oregon and one in Medellin, Colombia. Also, 4 more networks people are currently pre-registering subscribers for in their communities, for example <a href="https://althea.net/hilltop" rel="nofollow">https://althea.net/hilltop</a>.
I've been very intrigued by their efforts for some time now. Last time I read about NYC Mesh, it sent me down a rabbit hole of research into mesh networks and what it takes to found an ISP. I'd love to replicate their efforts in NOLA, but the legal and technical hurdles are tricky!<p>When I had looked into it, these resources had been helpful for research:<p>Wireless Networking in the Developing world -- <a href="http://wndw.net/" rel="nofollow">http://wndw.net/</a> -- A useful guidebook on the tech needed for large scale community mesh networks<p>Guifi.net -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net</a> -- A huge wireless mesh in Spain, there's a linked economic report in the references that's very good but may be unavailable at the moment. It may have been, or be contained within, "The Cook Report on Internet Protocol" Volume XX1, No, 12 & XXII, No 1 March April 2013
ISSN 1071 - 6327. The report is very long and covers quite a bit of the social and technical challenges faced by Guifi.net
There were (maybe still are) tons of such mesh networks run by small commercial operators in Germany's rural areas, usually using directional radio to create connections between villages and then meshing all the wifi consumer routers to span wifi over the village. They did that/do that because the major commercial providers (i.e. Telekom) weren't exactly fast laying fiber to these villages.<p>A buddy of mine used to run such a network spanning 3 villages with about 400 customers a bunch of years back. I seem to remember one of the directional antennas was strategically placed in some church tower.<p>They ran this as a two people operation. Extreme weather also was a problem for them, and they essentially learned network design by trial and error, starting out as a fully bridged network where everybody was in the same 10.0.0.0/8, NATed to the outside. They fixed that later. Customers only got like 3-4MBit/s from this mesh, which wasn't exactly fast but not too shabby either back then, especially considering the only alternative those villagers had was ISDN speeds (128kbit/s max I think). No LTE yet either.<p>They weren't alone either. There was a huge number of such operators who shared knowledge etc.<p>Once he started negotiating with those villages to lay fiber and provide DSL service all of the sudden the Telekom started fibering up "his" villages.
As someone who is on NYC Mesh - it’s amazing. I can’t explain the feeling you can get of pointing an antenna at a distant building and getting a ping. So great!
There's a map of community-owned networks, more than 750 communities across the United States have embraced operating their own broadband network<p>Map here:<p><a href="https://muninetworks.org/communitymap" rel="nofollow">https://muninetworks.org/communitymap</a>
Vice had a good feature on this last month. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paj8z8/a-diy-internet-network-has-drastically-expanded-its-coverage-in-nyc" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paj8z8/a-diy-internet-net...</a>
Who does the backhaul for these networks? If it's regular ISPs, aren't all of the participants just violating their ISP terms and conditions?
What is impressive here, that it's a "mesh" or that it's a volunteer for driven?<p>Years ago all Minsk was covered by volunteer maintained local ethernet networks, I was accessing internet through one. Today most of them are bought out by commercial providers, some turned into providers themselves.
I'm kindda surprised internet affordability is even a blip on the radar in NY compared to housing affordability. Though I'm 100% supportive of the philosophical basis on creating the network.
There's a lot of good amateur radio mesh nets around as well - I'm in the process of setting up an antenna to join one in Orange County <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/orangecountymeshorganization/home" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/orangecountymeshorganization/h...</a>
I live in a peripheral area of Europe and this is how we get our internet since 12 years from a co-op. Our speed is lower 10 Mb download and a lot less upload but it's good enough.
This is interesting - it says that they are connected to an internet exchange point (IXP), which means presumably they are their own AS and don't pay for peering. It makes them basically a peer of Verizon, etc..<p>It's a bit of a reminder of what the internet actually is - a bunch of networks connected together. If you make your own network, negotiate or purchase a piece of the IPv6 address space, and convince someone to connect to you and exchange BGP routes then you are part of it.<p>I wonder how hard it is to join an IXP and how much it costs?
> Spectrum said it also offers a slower $15-a-month connection to eligible low-income families and seniors.<p>For what it's worth, the plan is called "Every Day Low Price Internet", and there's no formal eligibility requirements. Spectrum doesn't advertise the plan, but you can see it listed at: <a href="https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html</a><p>For $15 per month, I get 3 mb down / 1 mb up. The price never changes, there's no hidden fee, no bundle crap etc.<p>Even as a heavy internet user, I'm very satisfied. It's plenty fast enough for general web browsing, and I let larger downloads run overnight. I can't stream videos above 720p, but I can just wait for them to download in the background with youtube-dl. I also have a script that autodownloads new Youtube videos while I sleep.<p>Fios is available in my apartment, but for $50 more per month, it's not worth it. If I wasn't in a rental apartment I would seriously consider NYC Mesh, but I'm not. (I'd also be a bit concerned about latency.)<p>---<p>Edit: Actually, looking at the rate card again, the article was likely referring to "Spectrum Internet Assist", which is still $15 a month but offers 30 down / 4 up—but with eligibility requirements: <a href="https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/spectrum-internet-assist" rel="nofollow">https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/spectrum-internet-as...</a>
I worked as an IT tech in a school district with 9 buildings, each connected by directional antenna. The speed wasn't great but certainly usable enough, even for video. This was back in 2000 and the guy maintaining the network learned it all on his own as far as I can tell. Weather was a problem for the network as outages were fairly common. We had an outside tech who would come out to fix the radios once in a while. Overall it got the job done, but eventually the district ponied up for a fiber connection to at least a few of the larger buildings. I helped lay new wiring for most of the buildings.
Reminds me of this: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan_Network" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan...</a>
What if every household enabled an open "guest" SSID on their Wifi router? Wouldn't it have a huge positive impact of giving access to people who can't afford mobile data or home internet?
I love this idea and concept, and I hope it will work well and expand. But if such a concept were to work and expand to big cities, I wonder what will happen to people living outside big cities...<p>While I don't know anything about the US market, I also wonder what is the motivation to make this project at home instead of mobile-based. Since we all have super-powerful computers in our pockets, it seems to me that we could have an easier similar solution using a smartphone mesh, especially in big and crowded cities?
Quotes:"The Mesh maintains a “super node” antenna and 31 hubs throughout lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that collectively serve about 350 residences."..."“Plus the people are nice,” she said. “It’s a great community.”<p>Yeah, 350 is less then a block of customers for Comcast or Verizon. When only few people are involved everything is great, try to scale this bigger then you'll the real shit go down. It's human condition, individually we are smart, but when in large groups we're stupid.
I'm curious about how these things are expected to scale..<p>1000 subscribers, dedicated support person<p>5000, ???<p>10000, ???<p>At some point these community efforts must grow back into a company again, right? And the cycle repeats
Interesting. I wonder what equipment they're using for $110 that gets a high-bandwidth data signal over multiple city blocks without running afoul of the FCC's limits for broadcast power and signal strength. At certain frequencies those can be remarkably constraining, low enough you can easily exceed them with a twenty dollar wifi adapter and a ten dollar yagi antenna.
Wow! Is $66 really considered cheap internet these days?<p>I pay around $14 monthly for 100 Mbps connection from a corporate internet provider (which typically gives me around 20 Mbps download and upload when I test). No installation fee and free equipment. Same internet, but from a different country. Is the internet connection in the NYC Mesh really that much faster?
That's all great IF you live in a new building that has ethernet throughout. I live in central London where there's fiber on my street and yet I can only get ADSL @ max 8MB/s. I'd happily pay some office next door to share their gigabit fibre with me over wifi. Why hasn't anyone solved this?
some context on the primary ISP in NYC: 1 year ago (2018-07-27) Spectrum got "kicked out of NYC": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17628906" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17628906</a><p>then in April 2019, managed to avoid getting kicked out by agreeing to expansion and paying a fine: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/charter-avoids-getting-kicked-out-of-new-york-agrees-to-new-merger-conditions/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/charter-avoids-g...</a>
Wait, how can internet start from $66 in NYC of all places? Where a teeny bit of extra cable can get the connection to hundreds of other subscribers? I smell a rort.
This is a great use case for crypto. You can earn by supporting the network and spend it to use the network. It helps the incentive layer. Those supporting the network can pay for support personnel as they grow, or there can be a network tax that goes towards this. You can also decentralize the support personnel by rewarding people that successfully answer tickets and offer a premium for when questions are answered within a certain amount of time. These questions and answers would also be stored on-chain on a sidechain.
While I am in favor of increasing competition among ISPs. I don't see how making it volunteer-based is actually good. All this does is take away presumably well-paying jobs from those who need them. IMO, a for-profit company developing a new mesh network would be more compelling. Not only would it provide local jobs, but it would also drive down the cost of internet for all. Somehow though, I feel this is a minority view.