40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh broadband networks, where gigabit connections are transmitted by line-of-site wireless across neighborhoods from the tops of tall buildings; it’s called the Equitable Internet Initiative.
This is possible in part because of the ubiquitous abandoned dark fiber, which runs under the streets of Detroit, as it does across many US cities, unused and dormant. The project relies on “digital stewards” who undergo a 20-week training program that teaches them to pull fiber, configure routers, and install and service microwave antennas, as well as teaching their communities to use the services delivered over the internet.
Each local mesh is designed to wire together a neighborhood on an intranet that would continue to function even in the event of internet outages, providing a resilient hub for organizing responses to extreme weather, natural disasters, and other crises.
https://boingboing.net/2017/11/17/equitable-internet-initiative.html
And that’s kinda how my shit-ass country got some of the fastest, cheapest internet in the world. Everybody and their grandmother laid a wire from their computer to the neighbor on floor 4 so they could multiplayer computer games, and then there were more wires, and building-wide LANs administered by some dude who ran it all on equipment living behind auntie’s favourite armchair, and then the LANs started merging, and people gamed like crazy so they wanted good ping, and people fileshared like crazy so they wanted good bandwidth, and nobody had money so it’d better not cost much and even let you hang out on credit for a while, and so, from this primordial soup of LANs, many emerged that were great value for money, and by now they had external internet connections (at slower-speed than internal, I still remember the ads listing metropolitan vs external XD) so we actually had a primordial soup of ISPs that grew and merged and split, and when the big corporations rolled in town, they had to compete with all of us bastards, and they couldn’t *possibly* be cheaper than the dude on floor 3 so they had to beat us on quality while keeping the price low, and this is how Romania pays 10$/month for gigabit with free dynamic dns included. And like….it’s all large companies owned by foreign cable conglomerates these days, but none of them could ever rely on being the only game in town, and the moment one of them tries to blink people switch to another en masse so they don’t blink, and the biggest ISP on the market is owned by the Dutch but what it actually is is a Katamari Damacy of a bunch of home-grown ISPs, because it’s easy to grow while keeping costs low if you don’t have to bother about that last mile to customer, because that last mile to customer is wired to hell and back by about 5 different networks per block, so here’s to Detroit having the fastest home internet in the US in about 10 years ;)