Burned out from his job as a programmer, he wanted to do something community-based that could have an impact. Hall when he was starting NYC Mesh back in 2014. The biggest community network in the world is in Spain, and that has only 39,000 connections. The pandemic has actually helped his initiative get there, and it might encourage New Yorkers to think about the internet in a new way - as a utility that everyone should be able to access.Ĭommunity Wi-Fi networks have been operating in other countries since the early 2000s. “To grow, we need to be on more tall buildings,” said Brian Hall, the founder of NYC Mesh. That’s a tiny slice of the 2.2 million New York City households with broadband at home, usually through one of the “incumbent providers,” as they are known: Verizon, Spectrum or Optimum.īut with NYC Mesh’s expansion into Brownsville, and a new contract with the city to place routers on a handful of housing developments, the one million New Yorkers who don’t have broadband - 46 percent of households in poverty lack a home connection - might soon have another, more affordable choice. Yet it’s still small, serving only about 800 households, concentrated in Lower Manhattan and central Brooklyn. NYC Mesh covers more neighborhoods than the others and is the largest community network in the city by far. “internet in a box” efforts led by the digital justice organization Community Tech NY, and the internet cooperative People’s Choice, started by former Spectrum strikers - to smaller for-profits like Starry, a Boston-based start-up rolling out flat-rate internet plans of $50 a month in large urban markets including New York City. They range from community-owned models - like the D.I.Y. NYC Mesh is one of many fixed-wireless outfits in New York City. Cambridge’s family said they had become fed up with the take-it-or-leave-it pricing for spotty service that internet providers seem to get away with in this part of Brooklyn.
#Rusty spur install
Heredia is a 19-year-old volunteer with NYC Mesh, a nonprofit community Wi-Fi initiative, and he was there to install a router that would bring inexpensive Wi-Fi to the building. Heredia said, “you should have told us.” He could have moved up the installation. He had been without internet for nine weeks. Cambridge, a 28-year-old student who lives with his parents and younger brother in an apartment on the first floor, watched the scene apprehensively. Wearing a motorcycle jacket and boots, he crouched on Andre Cambridge’s roof, trying to see if he had a clear line of sight to the Riverdale Avenue Community School a half-mile off. Daniel Heredia peered across rooftops, surveying the derelict satellite dishes and rusty television antennas of Brownsville, Brooklyn.
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