[HN Gopher] NYC Mesh Community Internet
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NYC Mesh Community Internet
Author : eu
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-07-18 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Fnoord wrote:
| Amsterdam had such a project in ~2002, called Wireless East. It
| was subsidized. Not sure if still exists. I been to Serbia in
| 2008 and they were also rolling such out. Back then mobile
| traffic costs were insane.
| seibelj wrote:
| The article mentions a problem is the mesh goes down and they
| rely on volunteers to fix it. Furthermore the "volunteer" who
| installed required a $50 tip to come out. I get why this is so
| much cheaper but without an organizational structure with people
| paid to come fix stuff you will always have situations where
| stuff is busted. Plus as more non-tech, non-ideological folk get
| connected they will abuse the volunteers when they come to help
| just as people do with any tech support, and volunteers are under
| no obligation to assist if they get annoyed. I think a formal
| non-profit structure with employees will be required to make this
| work. If the goal is an under-the-table donation at fixed prices
| then this can work as a tax dodge for informal employment (which
| is also interesting) but again, this isn't a sustainable model.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm certainly all for community projects like this, but you're
| right. This is just creating an under-the-table economy. For
| some reason The NY Times gets mad at people who do legal tax
| avoidance, but supports the "little guy" making outright under-
| the-table income.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Furthermore the "volunteer" who installed required a $50 tip
| to come out.
|
| I assumed the tip wasn't a hard requirement? Is there a reason
| you thought otherwise? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tip.
|
| Obviously, it would be crappy not to give them anything if
| you're a well-to-do person, but one of the purposes is to
| service lower-income households.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Their model goes beyond creating a community based network.
| They also encourage a fair amount of self education. The non-
| technical market is not the market for nyc mesh and probably
| never will be. If you want an internet connection that is
| serviced you should pay a service provider.
|
| The goal of nyc mesh is not capitalism or to become a standard
| ISP.
| seibelj wrote:
| I don't see how anyone goes through the hassle of installing
| this for a, "eh, maybe it works sometimes" internet
| connection. This has nothing to do with capitalism other than
| the basic understanding that people won't give their time
| away for nothing on a reliable, ongoing basis.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| If you do not understand why you would install equipment
| and grow a network owned and operated by a community that
| gets better with each addition, then you are not part of
| the market for this.
|
| No one said it only works sometimes or wasn't reliable. You
| just won't be using it to binge watch TV shows or
| competively gaming.
| seibelj wrote:
| NY Mesh now has an official contract with the city to
| wire up housing projects and low income housing,
| according to the article. This is not a hobbyist
| situation where all of the working class will learn how
| to be network engineers. I don't think you understand
| what is going on.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Well as a member of the NYC Mesh network and someone who
| advocated for the city to contract NYC Mesh two years ago
| when De Blasio announced a city wide internet initiative,
| I'd like to think I have some idea. I guess time will
| tell, good luck fighting it.
| seibelj wrote:
| Well if you speak for the NY Mesh project as you claim,
| and your stance is that taxpayer dollars should go to
| wire up residents with internet they can't rely on, can't
| get support on, and have to pay for help with a tip-based
| system or else learn to be a networking engineer, then I
| think anyone reading can understand our differences in
| opinion and how sustainable each of us thinks this is. I
| wish you luck your informal, no-employment, black-market-
| yet-taxpayer subsidized internet service that no one
| should expect to rely on in an emergency.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I didn't claim to speak for NYC Mesh, I claimed to have
| advocating that De Blasio's initiative utilize the NYC
| Mesh network.
|
| This isn't the first time the city has given an ISP to
| provide internet access for NYC and previous attempts by
| large ISPs were either a lie or unsuccessful. Yes I do
| think internet should be community operated and owned and
| if that means the city pays NYC Mesh some money to
| install and maintain it, then that's good for the city.
| That's tax money being invested into the quality of the
| neighborhoods. Where did you get this information that
| the contract excludes any sort of maintenance?
|
| The current system for ANYONE who wants to be apart of
| the network but not install is tipped based. There is
| nothing that indicates the contract between the city and
| NYC Mesh would operate that way.
|
| These networks are so easy to set up that almost little
| to no maintenance is required. And this is the first step
| to city wholly owned and maintained networks that is a
| good thing. That means the people in the city are better
| off and more self sufficient when it comes to internet
| access.
|
| NYC Mesh has an excellent track record of providing and
| maintaining service (maybe at a cost or not). Large ISPs
| have continually failed in that regard. So yes this is a
| better and more visible use of money.
|
| I invite you to get involved and be more than an arm
| chair critic.
| seibelj wrote:
| I think it can work but I wish you and the NYT would
| acknowledge this for what it is - a government subsidized
| black-market internet business. I think it would easy to
| start many businesses by replacing "employees" with
| "volunteers" and "wages" with "tips" to avoid all of the
| record keeping, payroll taxes, legal liability,
| regulations, and all of the issues that make running a
| normal organization in a liberal city (or any city with
| the rule of law) difficult and expensive. Even easier
| when the tax payers gave me money to do so.
|
| I'm all for this, but I hope you realize operating
| something like this at scale is only possible because you
| aren't paying even a minimum wage and are avoiding all
| the hassles and rules that make doing this according to
| what society wants for all other non-profit and profit
| entities. This is gig-economy ISP which apparently is
| great here but the NYT and leftists hate for all other
| places.
| brenschluss wrote:
| Uh, do you apply this argument to open source software as
| well? That open source libraries are a "black-market
| internet business"?
|
| Honestly it's wild to see this kind of logic of HN. Goes
| to show how much technology has become more about
| business culture than about the technology itself.
| seibelj wrote:
| You must agree that open source software and physical
| hardware installed on buildings powering a critical
| service are different things? The ISPs have enormous
| labor forces that are represented by telecom unions, this
| is an extremely regulated heavily subsidized industry.
| Open source software has nothing to do with this.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| No I think it's a great blueprint for other places,
| that's one of the most exciting parts of it. Listen it
| might eventually evolve into a more standard operation
| but why does everything have to be profitable and have
| employees and be set up as a business? This is working
| until it doesn't and their track record shows no sign of
| slowing. All the issues for this ISP still apply to other
| ISPs. This one just happened to grow out of the interests
| of the community.
|
| > "NYT and leftists"
|
| No reason to politicize this and pigeon hole advocates.
| seibelj wrote:
| My understanding from your original comment about
| "capitalism" was that there is a strong ideological bent
| to this which is why I mentioned that. We are in
| agreement on the actions and ends but probably disagree
| on the means, whereas I come from a strong capitalist
| bent. I wish we could apply the same no-entity, no
| regulation, no-taxes, no formal employment model to many
| other things including housing and education. But for
| this one thing it's OK, but for others it's not. I wish
| we could let lots of experiments exist free of the
| strangling governmental structures.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| No ideological bent just being general. I can see how one
| could misconstrue that from what I wrote.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| This is great but I want to see a community mesh network which
| competes with the internet rather than delivering it. Best of it
| was based on existing wifi overlaps. Distributed, decentralized.
| iptrans wrote:
| People want to access to the Internet, not your LAN.
| seventytwo wrote:
| How applicable is this model to rural or mountainous regions?
| iptrans wrote:
| A mesh network requires short hops or line of sight and willing
| participants. You might come up short on all accounts.
|
| A traditional WISP model might be more practical, if you can
| secure tower sites.
| rshnotsecure wrote:
| It bothers me that people are not more suspicious of things like
| this. Setting up a mesh internet grid is not a trivial
| engineering task. You would need to recruit at least several
| extremely skilled, extremely expensive network engineers with
| phenomenal understanding of how antennas work and radio wave
| propagation. You would have to run operations 24/7. You would
| need skilled lawyers in local, state, and federal law to fend off
| the legal challenges. Also you would have to have fierce
| integrity and honesty to not sell the data to recoup some of your
| costs.
|
| In addition to all this, you would have to be running an
| aggressive counterintelligence program internally, because such
| an operation any intelligence agency would love to be part of,
| whether you know it or not.
|
| The lack of widespread computer science knowledge in the United
| States makes it so we all continually fall for what are likely
| scams or intelligence agency plays.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The NSA already taps normal ISPs; why would them compromising
| this be any worse?
| iptrans wrote:
| Ignoring the lack of faith in humanity, what legal challenges
| are you afraid of?
| mdasen wrote:
| One of the things I've wondered is why people don't create small-
| mesh networks off their cable internet? For example, if I'm
| living in a relatively small apartment with nearby neighbors, why
| not get one of those WiFi mesh router systems and hook up 2-4
| apartments to a single internet connection?
|
| This project is really interesting, but it requires a certain
| amount of organization and technical expertise. Installing
| directional antennas, running wires, etc. isn't incredibly hard,
| but it's a lot more work than setting up a router.
|
| The new WiFi mesh routers are pretty great at covering a larger
| area and in my city the apartments are pretty close together. In
| a 3-unit building, it seems like you could just get one internet
| connection in the middle unit and a nice 3-unit WiFi mesh system
| and save on internet costs.
| op00to wrote:
| I don't want to get raided by the DEA cause my neighbor and
| network sharer likes to buy LSD online.
| iptrans wrote:
| That's not the reason why you don't share your Internet
| connection, that's the reason why you keep logs.
| iptrans wrote:
| ToS violation. You may not share Internet connections without
| explicit consent from the ISP.
|
| You can order a connection which allows sharing, but it'll cost
| you about a grand or so per month.
| rognjen wrote:
| I had a positive, albeit short, experience with mesh.
| jefftk wrote:
| Why short?
| rognjen wrote:
| Because I stayed in NYC for a short time only.
| cjmaria wrote:
| My small upstate NY city has a mesh internet provider
| https://www.massivemesh.net/ but frankly its one of the worst in
| town. They don't even list bandwidth speeds on their packages
| because they are so poor. They might be a better option than DSL,
| but not cable-based internet. I have team members who live in
| buildings that contract with this mesh company and they are
| constantly dropping out of zoom calls for unstable connections.
| The poorest parts of the city are out of range for their mesh
| network, but luckily people in these areas can qualify for low-
| income internet pricing from the cable company.
| afavour wrote:
| Mesh is such an awesome project. I remember when the pandemic
| lockdowns started I spoke to friends that teach in poorer
| neighborhoods and they regarded the schools plans as a joke: even
| if they distributed Chromebooks/tablets to every student without
| one, a lot of them didn't have an internet connection to use it
| with. A Mesh network with antennas on top of public buildings
| (schools, libraries) could have been a huge asset.
|
| That said, I don't have a Mesh internet connection because I live
| in a large apartment building and would need permission from the
| building owner to install anything. Even then, there are thirty-
| odd units in my building so splitting that antenna bandwidth
| between all of us wouldn't amount to much. A better option (that
| Mesh provides) is for large buildings to get fiber connections
| and share bandwidth with the Mesh network at large. But that
| would require considerable involvement from my building
| management and they couldn't care less.
|
| Given how common that is it seems like a big hurdle for the
| project, while corporate competitors like Starry will probably
| have an easier time convincing skeptical owners. Fingers crossed
| that as they roll out more locations more building owners will
| get on board.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| We need to work on changing the laws so that "they couldn't
| care less" is no longer relevant. Internet access is a human
| right. Housing without internet access should be viewed
| similarly to housing without electricity or indoor plumbing.
| coolaliasbro wrote:
| I'm not familiar enough with the technology to understand the
| privacy implications--are operators able to identify/snoop on
| specific users? I'm wondering how easily a building owner or
| landlord could collect and leverage their residents' data for
| any number of nefarious reasons.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| > I live in a large apartment building and would need
| permission from the building owner to install anything.
|
| Kinda strange for me. Do you need a permission for router
| install too?
| afavour wrote:
| I should clarify, I need permission to install anything _on
| the roof_ , which is how Mesh connections are almost always
| made.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| You don't have to share your mesh connection with all 30
| units and the equipment you install wouldn't be able to
| support 30 units. Mesh also isn't really available for Mega
| ultra fast connection speeds but more of a secondary
| connection.
|
| Having said that, the fun of mesh is having those
| conversations and getting others to also purchase equipment
| and install. Also as your neighbors and surrounding
| buildings add their own installs, the boxes will also
| wirelessly mesh together which will increase bandwidth and
| possibly speed.
|
| So maybe you could ask 2 of your neighbors to pitch in,
| which would get you the connection but also influence
| others to join in on your neighborhood network.
|
| Right now I bought a Ubiquiti Edge router and balance my
| connection so that NYC Mesh is a failover. Initially was
| receiving 40Mpbs download but checked again recently and
| now am sometimes seeing speeds of 100Mbps because the nodes
| in my neighborhood grew.
| afavour wrote:
| > You don't have to share your mesh connection with all
| 30 units and the equipment you install wouldn't be able
| to support 30 units.
|
| Right, and that's the key problem with building
| management approval. They're already disinterested and
| they're even less interested in installing something that
| only benefits one apartment or maybe a couple. There's
| already a specific exclusion against the likes of
| DirectTV satellites that only serve one apartment on the
| roof.
|
| So the best chance of getting approved is to go down the
| fiber route, but that's a so much larger and complex
| solution that there's less chance it'll ever happen.
| Feels a little catch 22-ish: the small solution is too
| small to get approved, the large solution is too large to
| get approved. None of this is Mesh's fault, it's just
| that plodding real estate interests in the city always
| default to doing nothing if they can.
|
| (worth noting though that a number of folks in NYC live
| in co-op buildings where the apartment owners _are_ the
| building management, I imagine the fiber option could
| make inroads there much more easily)
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| There's also the problem of landlords / apartment
| managers signing exclusivity deals with Comcast https://w
| ww.theregister.com/2017/08/23/big_cable_apartment_e...
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I don't think the small solution is too small to get
| approved. You just need to make the right arguments. "Hey
| let's install this so every apartment has free/low cost
| internet connection." Isn't the right argument. "Let's
| install this so we can be apart of a growing network,
| then if other residents are interested they can join with
| their own time investment. This way people have options
| and a working relationship with management. If this ends
| up as too much work then the equipment is easily
| removed."
|
| Make the argument to opt out and I think you will find
| that once it's in place no one will want to put in the
| time to opt out because the opt-in is all benefit.
|
| I understand what you're saying and the fiber option
| could be a later enhancement. I know NYC building
| management is sometimes difficult but my installs were
| fun and painless that I'm hard pressed to believe it
| wasn't worth it.
| [deleted]
| ThaDood wrote:
| Dunno if this is allowed or not, but paywall free version is
| here: https://archive.is/Z6GXD
|
| I would really love to do something like this in my neighborhood.
| Seems like an interesting project and a fun hobby but sadly I
| think I would have a hard time with hardware and finding willing
| people to help out.
| cartoonworld wrote:
| The hardware is readily available, you can also just use yagi
| or directional normal wifi, but the real difficulty is getting
| buy in and people to want to connect.
|
| Is it the sole internet or backup is an important question to
| answer.
|
| Find a local ham group, they may already be doing something
| similar and might be interested in other projects.
| ThaDood wrote:
| Oh yeah, hardware access is no problem. Its just cost, for me
| atleast. Finding people to connect would also be difficult.
|
| Funny you mention hammers. I checked and my local ham group
| is run by a bunch of right-wing nut jobs, so I don't think
| they would be interested in a meshnet.
| gravypod wrote:
| To echo this:
|
| When I was in college at NJIT I had access to a building,
| with roof access, 10G networking, head of networking was a
| friend, battery backup, and staff members on site at all
| times [0] and attempted to figure out what we'd need to
| connect to NYC Mesh or if they'd be interested in starting
| a sister mesh. We're in NJ so connecting to the NYC Mesh
| might have been difficult but we likely had line-of-sight
| to some parts of Manhattan.
|
| tl;dr: No one was able to help at the time and we'd have to
| foot the bill for the equipment which was not possible at
| the time. This is obviously completely reasonable but
| hopefully as they grow they can do more outreach.
|
| A Mesh alternative to standard ISPs is critical in my
| opinion. It could even be used for emergency communications
| in the next Sandy-like scenario.
|
| [0] - https://www.k2mff.club/ &
| https://web.njit.edu/~k2mff/ourwork.html
|
| > and we'd have to foot the bill for the equipment which
| was not possible at the time. This is obviously completely
| reasonable but hopefully as they grow they can do more
| senectus1 wrote:
| same... would def be down for this and my place is on an
| elevated lot, I'd make a great place for a omni directional.
| l00sed wrote:
| Pittsburgh, Chicago and Toronto are a couple other cities with
| community-driven network initiatives that I've researched.
| Also, the recent #yosoysnet movement and the Cuban state-run
| telecoms company (ETECSA) trying to cut off its citizens from
| the internet is another really relevant and interesting topic.
| Basically Cubans have built a full fledged branch of thousands
| of (illegal) nodes which is tangentially connected to the
| global internet. There were a few articles that Vice did about
| El Paquete, the daily couple terabytes of new "internet"
| (movies, music, news) that was shared over the SNET and by
| flashdrive. If you're interested, I've written a few articles
| on why I think community mesh nets could provide a solution to
| social media echo chambers and reduce the proliferation of
| conspiracy theories by providing a route for local-first news:
| https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/public-internet
| purple_ferret wrote:
| I thought about joining the network but it's a hard sell over
| Verizon Fios. 300/300 for $40 a month is hard to beat.
| julesqs wrote:
| you get that price in NYC?
| xyzelement wrote:
| Yup. It's on their website.
| julesqs wrote:
| wild how different the prices are, but I guess that's what
| happens when a lot of buildings only have one or two
| providers. No fios available for me, but I'm paying
| $70/month for optimum "up to 300 download, up to 35
| upload". Usually on speedtests I'm usually getting 15%-20%
| lower than that.
|
| edit for context: in brooklyn
| saaaam wrote:
| I use Mesh at home as my sole internet provider and I've had a
| great experience so far. I typically get 80mbps download, and the
| service has been overall very reliable (although there is an
| occasional brief outage or slowdown when it's raining hard). The
| only other option in my building is Optimum, which has its own
| reliability issues and is much more expensive (~$100/month for
| 200mbps).
| julesqs wrote:
| a coalition of groups in New York City is also pushing for a
| municipal broadband option: https://internetforall.nyc/
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(page generated 2021-07-18 23:02 UTC)