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NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

nycmesh.net

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Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#121

Post by walrus01 »

hyperpallium wrote: post #76

What about a mesh that is not connected to the internet? These days, people use the internet like TV or radio: many consume, few produce. What about a " community " mesh, where e.g. a small town has websites, email, webservices, gaming hosts etc for shops, businesses, sporting, clubs, council, local news and social media for that town?

It's entirely possible to build a WISP and have no transit upstreams or peers. If you wanted to truly island it you'd need additional DNS infrastructure that most wisps don't have. Never seen it done, though, because the use cases for such a thing are rare, vs a wisp that provides a default route to its customers out to the internet.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#122

Post by walrus01 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #67
fixthenet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Josh from the Community Broadband Project here. Would be happy to answer any questions about our mission and progress in LA. I'm no regular, but we just got a bunch of traffic from Hacker News and I'm here to spread the gospel. NYC Mesh is doing very cool stuff--we wish them the best. We're in touch with a few other community ISPs who are growing organically in competition against big incumbent ISPs. It's inspiring.…

You might be the totally wrong person to ask this and I apologize if this is a naive question. Is there a way a lay person (non network-engineer) can somehow get involved with their community to help get this started? I'd love to see something like this get started where I live (Minneapolis) and would be willing to help in any capacity I could.

One way that a lay person can help is with rooftop site acquisition, negotiation, contracts, marketing and presentation materials. Or as labor to install stuff, if it is a real nonprofit. Own a van that you can tie a 18' extension ladder to the roof? Great, you get to be the guy buying 16" concrete blocks from home Depot for the roof mount ballast.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#124

Post by adrianN »

8bitsrule wrote: post #86
benwilber0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would i go through all this effort just to let some stranger torrent iron man on my internet account

The general idea of Meshnets worldwide is to turn 'my internet account' into 'our internet'. all this effort = buying a router and plugging it into your computer.

Depending on your jurisdiction all this effort can also include legal fees, visits from the police and saying good bye to all electronic equipment for a couple of months while it's being investigated.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#125

Post by IntelMiner »

grahamburger wrote: post #100

I run a website about starting and running small wireless ISPs here: https://startyourownisp.com We also have a matrix chat room here: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#startyourownisp:matrix.org Don't want to detract from NYC Mesh or the conversation at all just thought this could be interesting for some of the folks on the thread.

I looked heavily into doing this about 8 years ago in a rural town in Australia

Sadly the "National Broadband Network" would've rendered it obsolete by now

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#126

Post by Famicoman »

fosco wrote: post #29
nerdponx wrote: post #26

I've been wanting to get involved in this kind of thing for a while now. Shame they use Slack, and not an open platform like Matrix or IRC, though!

I do not like slack either. that being said, get involved and get them in Matrix or IRC, not too difficult to enact change I think people could get in on it with appropriate leadership! zulip looks interesting to me as well.

They used to run a Matrix bridge, but from my understanding the administrators had no interest in maintaining it.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#127

Post by Famicoman »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #88

I have a few naïve questions maybe someone can answer: 1 - Why aren't they recommending any of the newer routers like the Asus RT-N66U/RT-AC68U? They're well supported by OpenWRT and more available. 2 - To start a similar service in another city, do you need fiber already to be laid? For example, I'm in Pittsburgh and we don't have any fiber anywhere, does that mean it'd be impossible to have a community mesh like th…

Hey there, I run Philly Mesh and am friendly with the MetaMesh folks in Pittsburgh. You might want to give them a shout if you’re interested in this stuff, https://www.metamesh.org

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#128

Post by Famicoman »

jedahan wrote: post #103
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #80

Are the organizers in this thread? I wonder if you folks were aware of cjdns, and if so why the decision not to use it? I've been thinking about setting up a cjdns-based mesh network in Philly but I don't think I have line-of-sight to any geeks.

Early (~3 years ago) NYCMesh used cjdns. I am not 100% sure of the reasons, but I think at the time cjdns had bad performance and was much harder to setup. I personally tried out cjdns recently and was pleasantly surprised with the ease of setup, though I still think hyperborea is having scaling issues and Guifi (the largest mesh) doesn't use it. There is nothing stopping anyone on NYC Mesh to use cjdns, and some of…

Cjdns’ crypto is a known cpu bottleneck, meaning it isn’t well suited for soho routers. Some of us mesh folks are squeezing power out of SBCs with great results, but cjdns’ roadmap might have us seeing more performant operation coming up :)

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#129

Post by Sidnicious »

mightybyte wrote: post #25

I was participating in NYC Mesh for awhile, but eventually I had to unplug because I got notices from my ISP about copyright infringement and I didn't want my internet access to get shut off. So sad. I really want this effort to succeed.

Can you share any more detail about this? My impression was that anyone who shared another internet connection with the mesh does it through a VPN tunnel, so traffic exits through the mesh's PoP.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#130

Post by bogomipz »

sethhochberg wrote: post #92
bogomipz wrote: post #75

Does anyone know who NYCMesh peers with? From their FAQ: "Are you an Internet Service Provider (ISP)? No, we are not an ISP, we are a community that shares ownership of a network. Collectively we have our own internet connection at our “supernode”. Also some of our members share their own internet connections. Our network peers with other networks at an internet exchange point and provides access to the internet with…

They publish their peering details and AS here: https://nycmesh.net/peering/

Thanks. It's still not clear to me how MYCMesh users would be able to reach the internet.

They state in their FAQ they are not an ISP which leaves me to believe they don't buy transit from anyone.

But looking at that peering link there are only 122K prefixes being advertised at DE-CIX NY and NYCMesh only peering with 14 other ASes there.

That would leave large parts of the internet unreachable. Perhaps Hurricane Electric or one their other 14 peers at DE-CIX NY have agreed to be act as transit AS for NYCMesh?

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