How a DIY Network Plans To Subvert Time Warner Cable's NYC Internet Monopoly (vice.com)

Jason Koebler writes: Toppling a telecom monopoly is the dream of many Americans, but the folks at NYC Mesh are actually doing something about it. On any given weekend, Brian Hall and his fellow organizers can be found around the city, installing directional Wi-Fi routers on rooftops. Anyone in the city who lives near another person on the network is welcome to join, and NYC Mesh volunteers will help you install a rooftop router. The network is still small, but it has partnered with two internet exchanges to install "super nodes" that have a range of several miles and are connected directly to the backbone of the internet.

Comments

Packet Ham Radio

[DesertNomad]

As much as I admire these folks, it's gonna be a network with limited throughput but potentially high resiliency except where it interfaces with the rest of the 'net. I've done many tens-of-kilometer shots, many home-brewed networks, using things like DD-WRT, Open-WRT, Tomato, etc., and it's great fun but it's something that requires regular heavy lifting, maintenance, investment, and quickly one realizes just how hard it is to not only keep running but to expand and grow. Go for it!

Re:Last mile monopolies

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopolies are a natural result of unregulated capitalism. For capitalism to work, a regulated market is required. Adam Smith, which it touted by lots of people who apparently think that monopolies are ok and are lobbying for less regulation, mentioned that monopolies would appear in unregulated markets and warned that this should not happen.

People who quote Adam Smith and at the same time think it's fine to stifle competition very conveniently forget the other bits that Adam Smith mentioned about regulating markets when using capitalism.

Neo-liberalists who want more regulation, don't want a free market, they want a stranglehold on the market.

Re:sounds good on paper

[HiThere]

That's not necessarily true if you're using directional antennas to partition the mesh. For that matter, if you're using directional antennas you could probably get away with infra-red links, which have a huge potential bandwidth. Doesn't sound like they're doing anything that fancy, though. Sounds more like a cellular system with a mesh local connection, which, which a small enough cell, could be done with next to no power so you wouldn't have a problem with overloading.

Yeah, if they were using a simple mesh network they could easily get overfilled, but then they wouldn't be using directional antennas, so that's not what they're doing.