ARLA/CLUSTER: Como um grupo de vizinhos criou os seus próprios serviços de Internet

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service

*Powered by radios in trees, homegrown network serves 50 houses on Orcas
Island*

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it
usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that's exactly
what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington
state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was
slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and
lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, 'what can we do?'� resident Chris Brems recalls.
“Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’�

Doe Bay is a rural environment. It’s a place where people judge others by
“what you can do,� according to Brems. The area's residents, many farmers
or ranchers, are largely accustomed to doing things for themselves.
Sutton's idea struck a chord. "A bunch of us finally just got fed up with
waiting for CenturyLink or anybody else to come to our rescue,� Sutton told
Ars.

Around that time, CenturyLink service went out for 10 days
<http://www.utc.wa.gov/aboutUs/Lists/News/DispForm.aspx?ID=269>, a problem
caused by a severed underwater fiber cable. Outages lasting a day or two
were also common, Sutton said.

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island
residents designed their *own* network and built it themselves.
The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA <http://dbiua.org/>),
founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service
to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed
on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios
get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a
signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

"I think people were leery whether we could be able to actually do it,
seeing as nobody else could get better Internet out here," Sutton said.

But the founders believed in the project, and the network went live in
September 2014. DBIUA has grown gradually, now serving about 50 homes.

Read the full story:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-group-of-neighbors-created-their-own-internet-service/
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