New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

I'm going through this now, but following links, perhaps, answers your Q.

Mesh Design: https://docs.nycmesh.net/networking/mesh/

Supernode Architecture: https://docs.nycmesh.net/networking/supernode-architecture/

From their docs, it looks like they're deploying a series of neighborhood-scale mesh networks, each with at least one "supernode" which acts as gateway to other supernodes and the meshes behind them, and possibly also to the internet. All the supernodes themselves are meshed together as well, each with its own private ASN.

can any Manhattan users here share their experiences? especially if more upper

If I understand it correctly, the two ways that incumbents are able to kill these efforts are through lower costs and through infrastructure restrictions. Emitting radio waves is both cheaper and lower-infrastructure than laying fiber. The question in my mind is whether the quality holds up.

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.

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.

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.

They weren't alone either. There was a huge number of such operators who shared knowledge etc.

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.