NYC Mesh is a physical network of interconnected routers and a group of enthusiasts working to support the expansion of the project as a freely accessible, open,

wireless community network Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, NGO's and cooperatives in order to provi ...

. NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider (ISP), although it does connect to the internet and offer internet access as a service to members. The network includes over 1,000 active member nodes throughout the five boroughs of New York City, with concentrations of users in lower Manhattan and

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

Aim

The goal of NYC Mesh is to build a large scale,

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

digital network, owned by those who run it, that will eventually cover all of New York City and neighboring urban areas. Participation in the project is governed by its Network Commons License. This agreement, partially modeled on a similar license in use by Guifi.net, lists four key tenets: * Participants are free to use the network for any purpose that does not limit the freedom of others to do the same, * Participants are free to know how the network and its components function, * Participants are free to offer and accept services on the network on their own terms, and * By joining the free network, participants agree to extend the network to others under the same conditions. Other similar projects include

Freifunk Freifunk (German for: "free radio") is a non-commercial open grassroots initiative to support free computer networks in the German region. Freifunk is part of the international movement for a wireless community network. The initiative counts about ...

in Germany, Ninux in Italy, Sarantaporo.gr in Greece, the People's Open Network in Oakland, CA, and Red Hook Wi-Fi in Brooklyn, NY.

Technology

Like many other free community-driven networks, NYC Mesh uses

mesh A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands. Types * A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, exp ...

technology to facilitate robustness and resiliency. NYC Mesh previously used

BGP Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector routing protocol, and it mak ...

for routing within the network, though this was found to be too static so the network was changed to use

OSPF Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It uses a link state routing (LSR) algorithm and falls into the group of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), operating within a single autonomous syst ...

routing instead. The network relies on a variety of wireless links to connect individual nodes and larger sections of the network together. Most nodes use both a long range directional antenna for up-link to a hub along with a shorter range omni-directional antenna that provides connections to other nearby nodes. This omni-directional antenna also includes a router and 5 port network switch. From the roof, cables are run to each apartment which is provided with

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...

from an indoor Wi-Fi access point. Each node can support up to 4 apartments by itself, but can be upgraded to support more with additional equipment.

History

NYC Mesh was founded in 2012 and was originally based on the Cjdns protocol. In 2015 the project received a grant from ISOC-NY, the New York chapter of the

Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people ...

. NYC Mesh connects to the internet via the

DE-CIX DE-CIX (Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange) is an operator of carrier- and data-center-neutral Internet Exchanges, with operations in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. All DE-CIX activities and companies ...

internet exchange point (IXP) at its first super node, Sabey Data Center at 375 Pearl Street, peering with companies such as Akamai, Apple, Google, and Hurricane Electric. Later, another supernode was opened up on the roof of the DataVerge (formerly ColoGuard) datacenter in Industry City, Brooklyn The project received a membership boost due to the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

vote in December 2017 to repeal its 2015 net neutrality rules. Coinciding with this decision, the average number of member sign-ups requests per month jumped from about 20 to over 400.

References

External links

*{{Official, https://www.nycmesh.net Community networks Custom firmware Mesh networking Wireless

Aim

Technology

History

See also

References

External links