A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC
from the do-it-yourself dept
A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It’s the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies.
NYC Mesh is a sort of guerilla activist project that installs wireless mesh networking antennas and routers on the top of buildings to deliver affordable (sometimes free) broadband.”
CNET has done a good profile piece on the project, which charges users a $50 fee for the installation and a pay-what-you-can monthly donation to keep the network operating. DIY’ers can install the service for free. Subscribers are encouraged to share their connections with other locals. The organization says it never disconnects users for non-payment.
These aren’t the kind of next-gen fiber connections you want to run a business off of, but they do provide essential access to marginalized neighborhoods that can’t afford broadband from their regional monopoly (in NYC that’s usually Charter/Spectrum or Verizon):
“NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider, but a grassroots, volunteer-run community network. Its aim is to create an affordable, open and reliable network that’s accessible to all New Yorkers for both daily and emergency internet use. Santana says the group’s members want to help people determine their own digital future and “bring back the internet to what it used to be.”
Around a thousand U.S. communities have built some flavor of community-owned and operated broadband network, whether it’s something like NYC Mesh, fiber deployed by the city-owned utility, a local cooperative, or a direct municipal broadband build. As always, these communities wouldn’t be deploying their own networks if not for market failure at the hands of regional monopolies.
“ISPs are always trying to maximize profits. We are just trying to connect our members for the lowest cost possible,” says Brian Hall, one of the lead volunteers and founders of NYC Mesh.
Federal policymakers talk a lot about the “digital divide,” yet routinely fail to address the core reason for it: we turned broadband into a luxury good dominated by a handful of extremely political powerful regional monopolies, hellbent on nickel-and-diming customers trapped by a lack of competition. We didn’t block mergers, we didn’t hold them accountable, and we somehow act surprised at the result.
Instead of directly tackling monopoly power (in fact the folks at the FCC under both parties routinely can’t even admit there’s a problem in public facing statements), we enjoy throwing billions in taxpayer subsidies at said monopolies in the hopes that this time, our “bad luck” will finally change.
Meanwhile, a growing list of communities countrywide have grown tired of waiting for competent federal broadband policy, and continue to take matters into their own hands. Often with zero messaging or policy support from federal regulators purportedly dedicated to “bridging the digital divide.”
Filed Under: broadband, high speed internet, mesh networking, nyc, nycmesh, wireless
Comments on “A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC”
I imagine that whoever the big ISPs in NYC are, they’re aggressively lobbying some local politicians to get such “anti-competitive practices” shut down as soon as possible.
Re:
New Yorker here, I can say that they are Spectrum and Verizon. We also have kiosks with public wi-fi.
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Don’t worry, this being NYC, you probably need about 73 permits from 34 agencies to install an antenna on a building and inevitably, these good samaritans forgot a couple so expect some no-knock raids that leave them in the hospital or worse.
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If there’s that much bureaucracy, perhaps the “Brazil defense” will work: make sure whoever shows up to inspect or complain has all their paperwork in order first. (“Have you got a 27B stroke 6?”)
Re: Re: Roof access
We are in 710 buildings. Roof access isn’t hard for most buildings.
building is easy
Building is easy, Maintaining and supporting is the hard and costly part.
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That’s not true. Building is the hard part. An ISP literally has to dig holes in the ground, set cables in, and add aboveground devices which transmit and renew signals. With fiber, all you have to do to maintain a finished network is switch out the devices every few decades to transmit higher volumes of data.
And even with long-obselete copper cables that large ISPs like Comcast and Spectrum refuse to replace with fiber, most of the time bandwidth caps under a few hundred megabytes per second are way lower than necessary. And more importantly, transmitting twice the data costs about the same as transmitting the half. It’s just electricity cost and the occasional repair. The marginal cost of transmitting more data is zero in the long term. Revenue rolls in and becomes almost entirely profit after 10-15 years. Old, degrading copper wires need repair more often than optical fiber too.
In short, if a large ISP like Comcast has trouble maintaining a network, it’s because the ISP’s executives deliberately pocket half the federal subsidies meant to go toward building fiber. And of course, the long-term cheapness of fiber means that large ISPs have no excuse for refusing to build more fiber with all of the public money they receive.
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…they are not putting some of their profits into maintenance and upgrade.
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This varies by area and regulatory framework. In much of the world, such as the U.K., that’s more the domain of infrastucture providers than ISPs (though some U.K. ISPs are installing cables to bypass OpenReach). The roles “inherent” to an ISP include customer service, IP address management, routing, interconnection, caching (like Netflix boxes), spying (CALEA and the like)… but even much of that can be outsourced. A big part of the U.S.A.’s problem is that, in most towns and cities, everything’s managed by one recalcitrant company.
Building per se is kind of hard, but not terribly. The bureaucracy is more of a roadblock. In areas where companies can easily get permission to run fiber on poles, new subscribers can often get a fiber installed in a matter of days.
It’d be great if this NYC group could morph into a major city-wide open-access network, and if the city could make that as easy as possible. One way the city could do that is to make a policy of installing conduit—empty or with dark fiber—every time they dig up any land that lacks conduits (during roadwork, subway maintenance, water pipe replacement, whatever).
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Thank you for all the hard work you guys do to make a difference in your city.
Re: Huh?
Wwwwhat? Care to explain that?
Or maybe they are. People seem to forget that most businesses aren’t rich national or multi-national chains that can afford anything. For the small bodega owner who needs an internet connection to find and contact suppliers, and maybe let their customers use, a “business” connection could be an annoying expense—particularly with real-estate costs and general inflation. Most small businesses don’t last long.
Error in Techdirt article
We formed 9 years ago, which was way before the Spectrum strike. The enemy in those days was Time Warner Cable.
The strikers have their own separate organization.
Re: thanks
Whoops, thank you.
I had conflated the union background with People’s Choice (which is engaged in a similar mission) in my head. Corrected, thank you (and please keep up the good work).
I worked for a major ISP on networks for a few years.
the cost of sending 100 megabytes of data from New York to Australia in 2017 was $0.000000001
thats one billionth of one cent. And thats via a smartphone.
Apple’s cost to MAKE such a smartphone in 2019 was a grand total of $9.50. That includes materials, labor AND shipping. but they slap another $140 on top of that for “research and development”. basically a way to reduce their tax overheads.
Companies lie about their costs all the time. But you can bet ISPs will send around ‘the heavies’ to beat the hell out of those fitting “not ours” systems….and it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve used violence to suppress community broadband.