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 KalÃ¸r
Jeremy Sturdivant
Maximilian A Klein
Ryan L Evans
Marc Christoffersen
Per Frederiksen
Christian Riis SÃ¸rensen
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
\#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.

Text from ebay page

Hi, thanks for looking at this equipment auction. These are used Ubiquiti wifi routers. There are 77 picostation 2 hp's. There are 26 bullet 2 hp's. There are 4 airgids (only three grids) though. I also have in 36 omnis and 1 unifi indoor.

This equipment has been used but on the shelf of my computer shop that I am selling for a year. There are probably ten units that do not work in the lot, but I do not want to through and test them all so am selling them cheaper because of it. *I can guarantee almost all work as that is why I kept them, just letting you know there will be a few that don't work, or possibly just need to be flashed to work. As well, they haven't been used in a year so before deploying I would consider flashing them with latest-greatest firmware from Ubquiti.

This is a great deal for anyone who is in the WISP business and needs cpe or WAP's. If you know Ubiquiti stuff you know it's high quality for not a lot of money, and in this case even less :)

The shipping will be determined by weight and where you are located. I will send an invoice from UPS so you can see I am only charging exactly what they estimate shipping costs to be. The routers are lightweight, but the grids and omnis add to the weight, so after the auction if you don't want those they can be omitted to keep shipping down.

I've gone through and boxed up most, a few don't still have boxes. Almost all have power cords except for a few. All of them have antenna, POE, and of course router.

This is a great deal to get routers for as cheap as only $25 with the understanding a few of them as you go thru testing will be not working. If you win the auction but are concerned for a fee I will go thru and flash each of them and test them, but for this price I have to sell with the understanding you will do testing and that at least 90 % will work. You can bid with confidence as I am reasonable and want to make sure you get what u expect :) I only have no use for this stuff anymore and will sell it cheap.

Mesh/Purchases