Internet feels like a human right now: providing access to information, communication, and life admin tools (at the least). There’s around 1m people in NYC that don’t have access to internet, due to cost barriers driven to the oligopolistic market of providers. They won’t invest in areas where it’s deemed a low return on investment.
NYC Mesh is a community run organisation, run by volunteers, helping people get access to high speed internet. Super nodes are fibre-connected and act as gateways, repeaters then beam internet to neighbourhood nodes, which relay it to a user’s individual router. It becomes a web of interconnected routers and repeaters keeping internet access operational. Users cover the cost of installation if they have the means, it still goes ahead if they don’t. Everything else is run on donations. It’s free for those who can’t financially support the cause.
Security-wise, the mesh router is firewalled from a user’s local network meaning it’s not possible to reach beyond the mesh router to a user’s local access network (LAN). The mesh internet connection and traffic between nodes is encrypted using WPA2.