FAQ

Users pay what they can. You choose how much money to contribute to the project in exchange for an internet connection. Some people choose to donate $60 a month; some don’t donate at all.

We prioritize privacy and autonomy. Unlike corporate internet service providers, Tucson Mesh doesn’t monitor the traffic of its users or sell sensitive data to third parties. We maintain net neutrality (which means we do not censor content or make speeds to some sites faster than others) and only ask users for limited contact information to stay in touch about the service. If you want to disconnect from the Mesh, you aren't locked into a contract.

We make connections, not customers. You are likely to meet people and build relationships and trust with your neighbors and fellow Tucsonans through participating in Tucson Mesh. You won’t meet anybody cool by signing up for corporate internet service!

Your relationship to the network is different than it is to a corporate internet service provider. As a member of this collective project, you and your fellow members have some responsibility for keeping it running. Your confidence in the network is grounded in the many experienced and dedicated Tucson Meshmakers who are invested in making the Mesh stable and fast.

Yes! Speeds at a typical home install are fast enough for streaming, video calls, and gaming for the whole household. Current speeds on the network are typically between 50 and 150 Mbps, symmetric.

Many of our current users work remotely and use Mesh for their jobs, and many find it more reliable than their previous mainstream service.

Building the Mesh also builds the relationships and practices for broader collective action to meet other important needs. We want to take internet access out of corporate hands, as a step towards taking all the social aspects of life out of the inhuman grind of our capitalist system, and into a better system more suited for human life.

We take pleasure in the skills we learn, the time we spend together, and in building something useful and elegant.

Internet bills are too high and contracts are too coercive. With commercial providers, you can get a good introductory rate, but then your bill starts climbing again. Subsidized internet access for people with low incomes require a bureaucratic application process and having to prove your income – requirements that pile on additional stress on top of economic hardship. Some of what you pay corporate providers goes to the actual work of maintaining the network… but a lot of it (hundreds of millions of dollars) goes to executives with astronomical salaries and even more of it (billions of dollars) goes to the people wealthy enough to own a stake in the companies. We wanted to pay less for internet access and take the same burden off of the shoulders of fellow Tucsonans.

Rooftop routers with strong antennas connect you wirelessly to your neighbors and to a central hub with a link to the broader internet.

Tucson Mesh gets bandwidth directly from an internet exchange point (IXP) - our current bandwidth provider is Login Business.

We connect to the broader internet at two "supernodes", sites with powerful antennas positioned as high above the ground as possible. These antennas send and receive wireless signals in all directions.

Integrated antennas and routers on the roof of your home connect to the supernodes, and the equipment on your neighbors' rooftops, providing a route to the internet.. When you join Tucson Mesh, you and other members of Tucson Mesh will install a wireless router on your rooftop. As more households connect to the Mesh, the network becomes more resilient and provides more options for connecting additional homes.

The rooftop equipment connects through a cable to a router inside your home that shares the connection with your laptops, phones and other devices. This inside router works the same with Tucson Mesh as with any internet provider.

You can reach out for support to our community of mesh users and administrators who monitor for outages and problems. The best way to do this is by starting a thread on our Slack (a popular chat app used in many workplaces), but you can also send us an email.

The team that helps run the Mesh and involved users are actively monitoring the network. For issues that impact multiple households, it's likely we're already aware of and working on the issue.

We are your friends and neighbors who came together to make a better internet. Some of us have tech experience; many of us are learning about this technology for the first time through participating in the Tucson Mesh project.

You can join in cultivating the Mesh by attending our public events and helping other users troubleshoot their connection or envision new possibilities for the network as part of our Slack community. We're trying to grow our capacity to include more people in helping to grow the Mesh infrastructure. 

We currently can provide service to areas to the North, Northeast and West of downtown Tucson. Members connect from neighborhoods like Menlo Park, Barrio Hollywood, Barrio Anita, Dunbar Spring, Barrio Blue Moon, Feldman's, Ocotillo Oracle, Keeling, West University and Sugar Hill. 

Since we use fixed wireless technology the strength of connection at a given location depends on how clear your rooftop’s line of sight is to one of the connected hubs we call "supernodes." This means that your ability to connect may depend on whether trees or other buildings restrict the lines of sight from your rooftop.

If you want to get connected, we'll ask you to collect some information, including photos taken from your roof, if possible. If your location and the information you collect looks promising, we'll come and conduct a site survey to measure the signal strength and explore options for mounting equipment on your roof.

We prioritize connecting groups of neighbors who want to join the Mesh at the same time, because this helps strengthen human relationships, cultivate a community of learning and support and make a more resilient network.

We connect people who are renting or who own their home, but prefer that people plan to be in their home for more than a few months, or expect future residents to use the connection and participate in sustaining the Mesh.

Expenses like routers, cables, mounting hardware and monitoring software are paid for with a combination of user donations and grant funds. If users, on average, donated about $17 every month, the project would sustain its current use completely through member donations.

The members of the Mesh admin team volunteer their time to take on administrative tasks, long term planning and building and maintaining technical infrastructure.