Digital Heroes: Connecting New Yorkers to Affordable, High-Speed Internet Access

Speaker 1: If no one owns the internet, what's stopping us from running it ourselves? Most of us think of high-speed internet as a product we buy from just a few providers, but there's an alternative community supported networks that rely on common infrastructure that are committed to providing affordable broadband to everyone. One of the largest community supported networks in the world is here in New York, a divided city of over 8 million. The digital divide leaves underserved households [00:00:30] and marginalized communities without reliable internet access. Speaker 2: See, I bet you guys have never had internet installation people having this much fun. Speaker 1: N Y C mesh wants to close the gap. It's a volunteer-led nonprofit that connects its members to the internet for a small donation and it doesn't block content, limit bandwidth or collect personal data. N Y C mesh does this by legally bypassing the big internet service providers, which studies have shown deliver unequal speed to customers, charge high prices and have poor customer [00:01:00] service. Speaker 3: Unlike them, we're not throttling anybody. We're trying to provide the best possible internet connection to the most amount of people all across New York. Speaker 1: The network relies on an expansive wireless mesh infrastructure where hundreds of access points or nodes talk to each other through long range wireless routers and antennas mounted on rooftops. There are also super nodes with a fast connection gateway to the internet and neighborhood hubs connecting to smaller nodes. [00:01:30] The more devices transmitting data, the further the network can spread, forming a web of connectivity that could potentially service millions. N Y C Mesh also has public wifi hotspots across the network. Speaker 4: This map shows the coverage of where our network infrastructure is. Network coverage is typically the spaces that you can see in the blue area that shaded, but realistically, it's anywhere where you have line of sight going from your location to any of one of these blue dots. Speaker 1: [00:02:00] If a node is blocked or loses signal, the network automatically finds the most direct available path to send data. That way you'll find a connection in an emergency situation and members can communicate with one another. Unlike with a typical I S P, Speaker 4: If your cable was cut to your house and you lost your internet, in the case of this, if your antenna gets misaligned, that could be okay. If that happens on your rooftop, you could hop through your neighbor's rooftop automatically [00:02:30] through that routing network, and that's really what the mesh is about, is providing a redundant way of being able to access the internet. Speaker 1: N Y C Mesh is a small group with a big mission. It's been growing steadily due to its core group of dedicated volunteers who perform household and building installations and repairs, administer the network, maintain the website, and do community outreach. Their website and Slack messaging space is full of open source technical content, allowing to learn D [00:03:00] I Y installation, troubleshoot, or research equipment. It's meant to provide a blueprint for other community-based networks across the country. Speaker 4: We try and publish everything that we can possibly put on our website so that other locations can kind of use us as a model or a workflow. Speaker 3: All you really need to do is fill out a join form and see how close you are to a neighbor who might already have the service and that'll get you connected. Speaker 1: Volunteers will check if you have a clear line of sight to another node. The network can only function if there [00:03:30] are no objects or buildings blocking rooftop routers. Speaker 2: For this particular install, we are looking at an install on President Street, which is smack dab in between these two buildings right here. If you zoom in far enough, you might be able to see there's two little white pieces of equipment way off in the distance. Speaker 1: A typical rooftop installation has an omnidirectional antenna, which broadcasts everywhere and a light beam, a point-to-point satellite antenna for longer distances. Speaker 2: Once we get this up, if we had [00:04:00] somebody over there who wanted internet across the street, we could just put one of these on the roof and they would automatically connect to each other and provide internet for someone across the street. Just mounting this antenna pointing roughly towards where our little hub is over there. Speaker 1: N Y C mesh volunteers don't need any technical expertise to start. They learn as they go along or take part in a group training. Many network users are also volunteers with so much grassroots support and education within the [00:04:30] group. The internet looks more like a community than a mysterious bunch of cables. Speaker 2: We had seven people who wanted to get connected and one day to do it, I think, and it was probably 34 degrees outside. Speaker 1: Once the router is working on a rooftop, N Y C mesh brings a cable down to connect it to your home router. Speaker 2: We're going to plug it into my laptop and we're going to test will's speed that he's getting here. [00:05:00] Hopefully that's registered. Yep. There we go. It's getting 60, 60, 50. 60 megabits. That's pretty good. That's really good with the antenna setup that we have. This is wonderful. Yeah, there you go. We are connected. Nice. Speaker 1: The average speed at a lot of N Y C mesh nodes depends on distance and interference. The biggest threat is heavy rain and wind, which can block data traffic between antennas. Speaker 2: Other than that, it's very stable and [00:05:30] we are very good at supporting it, so if you have problems, you can message somebody and somebody will fix it that day if they can. That's something that we really pride ourselves in and something that I think we do very much offer over a lot of these traditional ISPs. Speaker 1: N Y C mesh asks for a $200 donation for the equipment which you keep and $50 for the installation. You can pay a small monthly donation to keep up the network, but no one will be turned away or cut off if they can't afford it. The idea is simple. [00:06:00] If you're on the internet, you're part of the internet and no one should be denied access to an essential service. That's especially true for residents in a three building low-income housing complex. In the lower East side where N Y C mesh has one of its supernodes, the cluster of buildings is connected through underground fiber to a data center in Manhattan. That's where N Y C mesh gets direct access to the internet by exchanging traffic with other networks through a process called peering. They can do that without having to [00:06:30] pay a commercial. I S P N Y C mesh is serving almost a third of the 600 units in the affordable housing complex, providing fast gigabit speed fiber, internet connections to anyone who wants it. Speaker 1: Fiber internet is faster and more reliable than wireless or cable broadband. If you have a fiber connection, that means internet is flowing through thin glass fiber optic cables each smaller than a human hair. The data is transmitted using pulses of light, which is much faster than [00:07:00] electricity. Many N Y C mesh volunteers are trained in fiber infrastructure. At the three building complex fiber cables go up the trash shoots to different floors and N Y C mesh members use splicing equipment to connect tenants to the network. One member showed us how he removes layers of the fiber optic cable to expose a thin piece of glass. He connects two ends of the optical cables through the splicer, fussing them together through heat and adds a cover to protect it from breakage. [00:07:30] Broadband access shouldn't be a privilege. High-speed internet is critical to the health and survival of communities. We rely on it for education, employment, entertainment, and communication. That's why a digital equity project like N Y C mesh makes so much sense, but it'll need funding and support to keep it growing. Speaker 3: We're all a bunch of nerds who want to share the information and share knowledge, bring back the internet to what it used to be.