Detroit's Marginalized Communities Are Building Their Own Internet (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Motherboard has a report that discusses how some of Detroit's communities are building their own internet to help close the gap between the roughly 60 percent of Detroiters who have internet and 40 percent who don't. From the report: "[Diana Nucera, director of the Detroit Community Technology Project] is part of a growing cohort of Detroiters who have started a grassroots movement to close that gap, by building the internet themselves. It's a coalition of community members and multiple Detroit nonprofits. They're starting with three underserved neighborhoods, installing high speed internet that beams shared gigabit connections from an antenna on top of the tallest building on the street, and into the homes of people who have long gone without. They call it the Equitable Internet Initiative. The issue isn't only cost, though it is prohibitive for many Detroiters, but also infrastructure. Because of Detroit's economic woes, many Big Telecom companies haven't thought it worthwhile to invest in expanding their network to these communities. The city is filled with dark fiber optic cable that's not connected to any homes or businesses -- relics from more optimistic days.

Residents who can't afford internet, are on some kind of federal or city subsidy like food stamps, and students are prioritized for the Initiative, Nucera told me. The whole effort started last summer with enlisting digital stewards, locals from each neighborhood who were interested in working for the nonprofit coalition, doing everything from spreading the word, to teaching digital literacy, to installing routers and pulling fiber. Many of these stewards started out with little or no tech expertise, but after a 20-week-long training period, they've become experts able to install, troubleshoot, and maintain a network from end to end. They're also aiming to spread digital literacy, so people can truly own the network themselves."

Comments

I live near Detroit

[Puls4r]

And I don't have broadband. 1 mile from Comcast, but they $5k to extend. Frontier won't serve me DSL, because I'm too far from whatever. Satellite? Yeah right. I CAN pay $70 a month for 1.5 Mb MAX, which I signed up for and usually got like 250k. So now I use a verizon hotspot that maxes out after 4 days (15Gb) then drops to .6k..... which is better than nothing. And there isn't a damn thing I can do, but if you listen to the government I'm 'Served'. LOL.

Re:What a fucking surprise

[CaptainDork]

My tripwires will not let me go to that site, but seriously? 20 years?

You think Detroit was destroyed in the last 20 years?

First, there was decentralization. Strikes, inspired by union negotiations and a refusal by blacks and whites to work side by side, were halting progress, according to "Detroit, Race and Uneven Development," co-written by Joe T. Darden. Factories were built in the suburbs and in neighboring states so that if there was a protest in one factory, work could still continue elsewhere. But as the factories spread out, so too did the job opportunities.

When the industry then experimented with automation, replacing assembly-line jobs with machinery, tens of thousands of jobs were lost. The industry shrank even more during the energy crisis in the 1970s and the economic recession in the 1980s. And foreign competition caused profits to plummet.

What's keeping the ISPs

[rsilvergun]

from descending on this little town and crushing this? Just wondering. There's been podunk towns in the middle of nowhere who suggested doing muni-broadband and were shut down by a gaggle of lawyers chanting some nonsense about free enterprise and it not being fair they have to compete with government.

Speaking of which, anyone else find it funny that the same folks who tell you gov't can't do anything right also tell you gov't can't be allowed to compete with private business because it would be unfair? What are they afraid of, the gov't's just gonna fail anyway, right?