Calling All South End Residents!

Tonight marks the very first installation that we’ve put up in the wild. Thanks to the generous donation of roof space and bandwidth by a South End resident and friend of the mesh, we now have an uplink to the internet and a rooftop wireless router to share it with. The node is on West Canton Street. If you live in the area, and are interested in net neutrality, we want to hear from you!

The node is currently beaming 250Mbps directly into the Methunion Manor Coop buildings. This building will be a potential target for expansion, as we aim to build a network useful to those excluded by corporate internet providers’ high connection prices.

Stephen Aiming The Node

This connection is the first of many that we hope to make in Boston, and has a good line of site to many roof-tops in South End. While public housing residents can benefit from low or no cost internet, everyone can benefit from the enhanced security and net neutrality offered by a community-owned wireless network. Residents of South End who are interested in wireless community networks should absolutely send us an email! We love talking about the mesh almost as much as we love building it. If you decide you’re ready to install a node on the roof or in the window, we’ll make it happen together.

James Tightening The Node Down

Get Involved

While this little router might not look like much, it’s capable of delivering high speed connections wirelessly at medium range (a couple blocks.) There are many hardware options available to node hosts, and you can see a growing list of these on our wiki. For those who cannot afford the hardware necessary, no worries! We can subsidize hardware on a case by case basis.