'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi

So with line of sight I know you could 'beam internet' from either a plain old ISP connection OR from an internet exchange.

This was consumer grade equipment too, I am sure there is much much stronger out there.

As far as the potential of mesh in rural areas, I think one of those two options should be workable. Of course there are costs and geography that may hinder.

(correction to original post: I did not at first see an ASN for them, or announcements of their own IP space. They have an ASN and announce two /24s, and peer at one physical location in metro NYC).

Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment.

This part is so much unadulerated bullshit:

""The internet doesn't really cost you anything, it's just the connection [that has a fee]. So however you can get plugged in — then you're on the internet. Nobody owns the internet, there's no one to pay.""

Actual, reliable internet costs real money, both in the salaries of people to engineer and architect it, salaries for 24x7x365 clued-in NOC staff, equipment, salaries and expenses for field technicians to build it. And that's before you get into things like establishing colo at major IX points, serious core routers that cost $15k each (do you really want to deploy something in the year 2018 to take several full BGP tables that doesn't have a 4 million FIB capacity?), etc. The Internet is a significant construction project at OSI layer 1, whether you're putting PTP radios on rooftops, running aerial fiber, or underground fiber. Otherwise you're just piggybacking on something that another, larger entity has already built.

I give them an A for enthusiasm and effort. It just needs to be channeled the right way so that they can figure out what it actually costs to run a reliable ISP. I'm all in favor of new startup ISPs.

A spine/leaf arch would be great for this imo. The leaves can be local cells of wifi networks. The spine can be operated by payment collecting individuals that maintain a high speed(10g+) and low latency uplink to the internet and network gear that can handle the traffic from the leaves. In spine leaf, leaves connect to multiple spine nodes as well (don't have to worry about spine operator reliability too much,could potentially load balance over spine)

That being said,I hope any modern wifi network assumes wifi encryption is not reliable and instead implements a layer2 or 3 tunnel (macsec/.11ae and wireguard respectively)

Unfortunately, the building owner where I used to live wasn't interested -- it turned out most of the building was empty, people keeping apartments for occasional visits or as an investment :-(

https://www.hyperoptic.com/how-hyperoptic-works/ or https://www.hyperoptic.com/map/