Mesh/Purchases

First crowd-sourced purchase

• Date: June 2013.
• Contents of buy: Over 100 Uniquiti routers. Mostly Picostation 2 HPs and Bullet 2 HPs. A bunch of nice omnis. A few Ubiquiti M5 routers.
• Price: $2,257 including shipping.
• Funding sources: $2000 from WePay campaign and 0.6837 donated bitcoins.

Promoted on facebook, twitter, gittip, sudo room and noisebridge mailing lists and chat rooms and Reddit.

• Seller: User fixsum on ebay.

He has offered to help with advice and tech support. Has started at least two WISPs. One in Kigali, Rwanda.

Financial supporters

• Praveen Sinha
• Matthew Senate
• Emil Polny
• Michael R Linksvayer
• Mike Moody
• Daniel Kalør
• Jeremy Sturdivant
• Maximilian A Klein
• Ryan L Evans
• Marc Christoffersen
• Per Frederiksen
• Christian Riis Sørensen
• Susan T Dayton
• Thomas F Atlee
• Ryan Bethencourt
• Linda H Ryan
• John Reynolds
• Robert V Louie
• Richard D Bartlett
• Mark Burdett
• Lucas Guilkey
• Micah Daigle
• Jenny Ryan
• Three anonymous WePay contributors
  1. fort (J.C.)
• Reddit user patcon
• Reddit user cdelargy
• Two anonymous bitcoin contributors

• Reddit user deaddaughterconfetti on /r/oakland wants to donate two laptops. They were told they could drop them at sudo room most evenings (did they ever do it?)

Text from WePay campaign page

We are a group of volunteers growing a community mesh network in Oakland, California. This donation will go to purchasing the first 100 routers to build the mesh! For this first deployment of nodes, we're focusing on the San Antonio neighborhood, an area of East Oakland that is the most disconnected from the internet.

A mesh network is, in essence, free as in freedom alternative internet. Using low-cost routers (often donated or recycled) mounted on rooftops, we're currently building the backbone of the mesh throughout downtown Oakland, from West Oakland to the Fruitvale BART and beyond!

Mesh networks are awesome because they don't depend on the existing centralized Internet Service Providers to function. Though they can be connected to the Internet as we know it now, a mesh provides a decentralized means of communication with our local community. We view mesh networks as a means of reconnecting to our neighbors, supporting local businesses, and enabling grassroots community collaboration. In the event of disaster or government censorship, an active mesh network is a resilient means of communication and sharing of information.

You can also support us with a small weekly donation on Gittip: https://www.gittip.com/sudomesh/

OR send bitcoins to our wallet address: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc

We meet weekly at 8:30pm on Thursdays at Sudo Room, a community-supported hackerspace in downtown Oakland. Learn more about the project and how to get involved on our wiki: http://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

Reddit

We posted to /r/Oakland /r/darknetplan /r/bitcoin /r/darknet /r/technology. We posted the same post. The suggestion to cross-post to /r/oakland, /r/bitcoin and /r/technology was from other redditors as comments to the original posts. The result was that the decsription was too technical for /r/oakland and possibly some of the other sub-reddits (e.g. someone asked if all of this was a fancy way of saying "wifi").

Final score by sub-reddit:

• /r/darknetplan: 44 points, 6 comments
• /r/oakland: 24 points, 9 comments
• /r/bitcoin: 20 points, 6 comments, and at least two donations (two unaccounted for).
• /r/darknet: 7 points, 0 comments

Text from reddit post

Title: Bootstrapping the Oakland Community Mesh Network!

The Oakland (California) Community Mesh Group is setting up an initial network of 100 2.4 ghz outdoor routers for street-level access (mostly Ubiquiti Picostation 2 HP and Bullet 2 HP with Omni antennas) and 10-20 5 ghz rooftop nodes (mostly Ubiquiti M5 gear). We're trying to crowdfund most of this initial investment to take us from the planning stage to an actual mesh. Once we have the hardware, we'll be able to start building local experience with mesh deployment and involving the local communities in running their own network. We are currently a small group of dedicated volunteers with several advisors who have years of experience in community wifi deployments around the world. Our team includes co-founders of multiple hackerspaces, a cyber-anthropologist and two EFF employees. Any support, monetary or social media outreach, will be greatly appreciated!

• Crowdfunding campaign link
• Wiki page link
• Bitcoin wallet address: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc

Cross-posted to /r/darknet and /r/bitcoin

Praveen's post on facebook

This is a very worthy project to get off the ground and it won't take a lot of money. To give some background, Wifi/internet access is a desperately needed commodity in communities from India to SF/Oak. Corporate wifi hotspots are too expensive and municipal wifi has also largely failed in the Bay Area. There is a huge last mile problem, and mesh networking solves it very nicely. A mesh network is an open-access, free for everyone, peer to peer network that works by placing routers close together in a dense neighborhood. As a bonus, it's also secure from governmental spying. In this case, Jenny and Marc's group is looking to blanket East Oakland (in the hood where LOL is) with coverage. This would provide an open network for a large underserved population and is a great testbed for future deploys. Hoping people will pass around this fundraiser. Feel free to ask me or Jenny Ryan if you have any questions on what mesh is or what sorts of impacts it could have on a neighborhood.