131–140 of 174 posts
I think we had this before a few months ago. It is no different than any other regional transit provider (in the case of their fiber loop) or wireless ISP. You still have to pay for decent peering and you still have to deal with the laws of physics and claude shannon when deploying wireless networks.
Cool initiative based on positive ideals. From a practical perspective, NYC citizens have a number of good options for internet access; however, perhaps learnings from this community project can be brought to more needy areas outside the US.
Do you live in NYC? I do, and I don't have at all what I'd call "a number of good options" for internet access. In my area, there's two companies who operate similar to a monopoly (Verizon and Optimum), and regularly raise prices arbitrarily and often for no reason.
libremesh is based off openwrt, it needs a web-based dashboard, the firmware seems solid, very interesting.
So I have been toying with spooling one of these up for the past 6 months. I live too far uptown to get line of sight for their supernode, but I do have not 1, but three LinkNYC kiosks on my corner that offer gigabit for free. Wanted to test out using their LinkNYC option. Was going to use wireguard as a vpn backend on a router. The only downside for me is that I need to "re-log in" to google once a month. The wife w…
Stuff like this make me long to live in NYC. Only city in the US with the density, technical expertise, and money for this kind of thing to happen.
Source: I live here
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?
That place still exists on the internet. The 90s are alive on Tor.
There's a similar effort gaining traction in the Los Angeles area: https://www.communitybroadband.la/ I've also noticed that local municipalities are getting into the ISP business. Beverly Hills, for example, is currently deploying a city-owned/operated fiber-backed ISP: http://www.beverlyhills.org/fiber
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.…
What do you think about the idea of using the sewer system to lay either fiber or 10+gb copper? Before you think about how gross that is, consider the advancements in drone robotics. You would need to devise a cable-laying robot that could traverse the sewer via remote control. Mount fixtures to the top of the pipes and string the cables through, connecting neighborhoods.
This would require convincing the city to lease you the right-of-way and put up a bond to cover any repairs to damage caused by the cables. But it would solve both the bandwidth problem and the "those are our telephone poles!" Problem. What do you think?
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…
MMWC doesn't have its own fiber but does have access to KINBER's PennREN fiber network, a little-known gem in the commonwealth that happens to run down Fifth Ave and a few other main roads in the city. We're working on rolling out access to it. As we're a donations- and grant-funded non-profit, our rollout will be slower than a commercial operation.
Pittsburgh has a lot of fiber running through it, but most of it is commercial backbone fiber. One data center that I know of had 12 ISPs peering with it, and that was in 2009. Only Verizon FiOS has executed a residential rollout in the city, and you can read more about folks opinions on that in /r/pittsburgh.
I've passed this thread to the MMWC executive team for them to add more detail!
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!
Would you also find it to be a problem if they held a meeting and didn't serve fair trade coffee? Should they expel any members with politics you find objectionable? Must they demand that everyone give up their iOS and Android devices too because they're surveillance instruments and running non-free software too?
Here's a good Tumblr post this made me think of:
- [The Grey Tribe — Activism, Accessibility, Setting Good...](https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/175038067648/activism...)
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.…
I don't know if laying cable is one of your biggest challenges, but I assume it would be along with right-of-way. What do you think about the idea of using the sewer system to lay either fiber or 10+gb copper? Before you think about how gross that is, consider the advancements in drone robotics. You would need to devise a cable-laying robot that could traverse the sewer via remote control. Mount fixtures to the top o…