NYC Mesh
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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 or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives ...
. 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 2,000 active member nodes throughout the five
boroughs of New York City The boroughs of New York City are the five major governmental districts that comprise New York City. They are the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough is coextensive with a respective Administrative divisions of ...
, with concentrations of users in
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
and
Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...
.


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 related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and gi ...
digital network, owned by those who run and use 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 in Germany; Ninux in Italy; Sarantaporo.gr in Greece; the People's Open Network in Oakland, California; Philly Community Wireless in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Seattle Community Network in Seattle, Washington; and Red Hook Wi-Fi in Brooklyn, New York.


Technology

Like many other free community-driven networks, NYC Mesh uses
mesh Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus of index terms that facilitates searching. Created and updated by th ...
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 system (Internet), autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vect ...
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 sys ...
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 Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...
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

In 2012, a group called "NYC Meshnet" was formed to experiment with the Cjdns mesh protocol. This was the precursor to NYC Mesh. In 2014, NYC Mesh was launched with a new website and the first antennas were installed using firmware from Guifi. In 2015 NYC Mesh received a grant from ISOC-NY, the New York chapter of the
Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American non-profit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. It has offices in Reston, Virginia, United States, and Geneva, Switzerland. Organization The Internet Society ...
. On July 15, 2019, NYC Mesh incorporated as a
nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...
. On August 21, 2020, the
Internal Revenue Service The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting Taxation in the United States, U.S. federal taxes and administerin ...
issued NYC Mesh a determination letter of its
501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, Trust (business), trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of ...
status, retroactive to its incorporation date. NYC Mesh initially connected to the internet via the
DE-CIX DE-CIX (Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange) is an operator of carrier- and data-center-neutral Internet exchanges (IXs), with operations in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. All DE-CIX activities and com ...
internet exchange point (IXP) at its first supernode, Sabey Data Centers 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 government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains ju ...
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.


See also

* DIY networking *
Mesh networking A mesh network is a local area network network topology, topology in which the infrastructure Node (networking), nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many othe ...
*
Net neutrality Net neutrality, sometimes referred to as network neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, offering User (computing), users and online content providers consistent tra ...
* Freifunk * Guifi.net


References


External links

*{{Official, https://www.nycmesh.net Charities based in New York City Community networks Custom firmware Mesh networking Wireless