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NYC Mesh Overview

What is NYC Mesh?

NYC Mesh is a community network. This means that city residents take it upon themselves to maintain and grow the network. A massive amount of cooperation between many different people with many different skills is required to accomplish this, and this website is here to make sure that individuals who want to improve the network can get the knowledge and skills they need to do so.

If you have any questions, please read see our FAQ page at nycmesh.net/faq or reach out on slack.

About NYC Mesh

We are a community network offering fast, affordable, and fair access to the Internet for all New Yorkers. By 

By joining  NYC Mesh, youmembers can accessconnect to the Internet while simultaneously helping yourto neighborscreate getbetter better,internet saferaccess Internetfor access,their too. Adding ancommunities. NYC Mesh connectionworks to yourpromote apartmentdigital or building can serve as a backup Internet connectionequity in caseundeserved yourcommunities, commercialworking Internetto serviceensure goeslow-income down.families, recent immigrants, minority communities and people with disabilities have access to affordable, reliable and fair internet access.

As a community network, city residents such as yourselfmembers take it upon themselves to maintain and grow the network. NYC Mesh's maintenance and expansion is primarily supported by a dedicated team of volunteers which anyone is welcome to join. This means that in addition to accessing the Internet, you can also make friends, meet neighbors, and learn valuable technical and computer skills by participating in our active community, either in-person or online. We regularly host host face-to-face meetups, and you can join our our Slack chat. Both are great places to ask questions and otherwise connect with our active community.

About this Wiki

The NYC Mesh Wiki is thea central clearinghousesource for technicaltechnical, informationinstructional aboutand ourorganizational network.information. Here, we describe the implementation of specificexplain nodesrecommended hardware, we use, document installation procedures, list our hosted services and more.collect organizational practices and knowledge. This website is not a networking tutorial, so readers are expected to have some basic familiarity with computer internet working concepts to take full advantage of the material we present here, but we do strive to provide links to good educational resources for newcomers where it makes sense to do so.

There are a couple of different ways that you can make use of this website.

  • Like a book:  You can read the entire website "front to back." Use the navigation menu to proceed from one section to the next, in order. This will give you a good idea of how our network works and how you can help us improve and maintain it.
  • Like a reference:  You can skip directly to a section that interests you, or use this website to look up answers to specific questions that you have. This comes in particularly handy during an install or when troubleshooting issues.
    You can use the search bar at the top of the page to jump to a specific topic.

Moreover, this website itself is part of the community network and is maintained by volunteers. That means you can help us improve it by adding missing information, clarifying confusing points, or even just fixing typos you notice while you're reading. To edit the wiki, please follow the guide <here>.

Who should read this wiki

This wiki contains information about the technical  implementation of the NYC Mesh network itself, along with ancillary information about the standard operating procedures (SOPs) of various NYC Mesh volunteer teams.  Before reading this website, please read read our FAQ page.  Many common questions are answered there, and this documentation is mostly written with the assumption that readers are already familiar with the answers to our most frequently asked questions.

Once you have already read our FAQ, then you should consider reading or referring to this website if:

  • you want to help expand the network by physically installing new nodes,
  • you have computer networking experience and want to help improve the network's performance or security,
  • you plan to volunteer to monitor or otherwise maintain the network and have questions regarding the configuration of various hardware and software components, or
  • you are interested in knowing details about how NYC Mesh functions that are not already covered by the FAQ.

You should should not read this wiki if:

  • you want us to connect your apartment, house, or building to the mesh. Instead, please go to our our Get Connected  (join request) form where you will be put in contact with one of our install teams.
  • there is a problem with your connection and you need assistance from an NYC Mesh volunteer technician. Please use our our Request Support  form to open a trouble ticket to get help with problems you cannot fix on your own.
  • you are a member of the press seeking the latest news about NYC Mesh. We publish press releases specifically for journalists on our main website's s Press  page.
  • you are a member of the general public and are simply curious about our work. ForWe thiswould information,recommend please read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page onvisiting our main website or reading our our FAQ page, returning here only if theyou FAQwould doeslike notmore satiatedetail yourabout curiosity.a :)certain topic.

We are always excited to welcome new volunteers who want to help us continue providing affordable, fair, and fast Internet connectivity to our fair city and so we hope you find this guidebook useful.

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