Wireless community network
organizations that take a grassroots approach to providing a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers
Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are decentralized, self-managed and collaborative computer networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.
Many of these organizations set up wireless mesh networks which rely primarily on sharing of unmetered residential and business DSL and cable Internet. This sort of usage might be non-compliant with the terms of service of local internet service provider (ISPs) that deliver their service via the consumer phone and cable duopoly. Wireless community networks sometimes advocate complete freedom from censorship, and this position may be at odds with the acceptable use policies of some commercial services used. Some ISPs do allow sharing or reselling of bandwidth.
The First Latin American Summit of Community Networks, held in Argentina in 2018, presented the following definition for the term "community network": "Community networks are networks collectively owned and managed by the community for non-profit and community purposes. They are constituted by collectives, indigenous communities or non-profit civil society organizations that exercise their right to communicate, under the principles of democratic participation of their members, fairness, gender equality, diversity and plurality".
According to the Declaration on Community Connectivity, elaborated through a multistakeholder process organized by the Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity, community networks are recognised by a list of characteristics: Collective ownership; Social management; Open design; Open participation; Promotion of peering and transit; Promotion of the consideration of security and privacy concerns while designing and operating the network; and promotion of the development and circulation of local content in local languages.
History
Wireless community networks started as projects that evolved from amateur radio using packet radio, and from the free software community which substantially overlapped with the amateur radio community. Wireless neighborhood networks were established by technology enthusiasts in the early 2000s.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Wireless community network” is organizations that take a grassroots approach to providing a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wireless, community and network, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wireless community network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.