Personal Telco Project

We participated in the muni-broadband rally today. This needs to happen.

This is likely to be worthwhile listening to:

Portland’s Fight For The Internet Many Oregonians have been fighting for net neutrality before the phrase was ever coined. In 1998, Portland became one of the first cities to argue in support of “Open Access.” David Olson, the former Cable Director for the City of Portland, joins us to discuss Portland’s unique internet histor...

spotted at: https://twitter.com/Mu11ana/status/940523806250164224
"Liberty, Equality, Net Neutrality!"

The motivation for our group stems much more from dissatisfaction with telecommunications concentration and vertical integration than it does with helping disadvantaged people. We are happy that the latter is a side-effect, but it isn't our focus. We believe that networks should be operated in the interests of the users. Capitalism, partly because of the emergent monopolistic tendencies in capital intensive infrastructure generally, has done a poor job of keeping communications infrastructure focused on the users interests. In the current climate, we generally think that the solution to this problem is local, responsive, public ownership of last-mile telecommunications infrastructure, combined with open-access policies. This would allow telecommunications to become a flourishing and vibrant platform for both content producers and consumers, and not a choke point of strategic rent-seeking control. Our work with open wireless infrastructure was initially motivated by a desire to bypass the incumbent telcos, and persists as a way of demonstrating that capitulation is not the only option.

Personal Telco was at the DorkbotPDX meeting tonight and unloaded some items from the President's garage. Among them were a 60GHz wireless link we received as a donation, but didn't have a use for, and a box of threaded aluminum hex-rod which we'd salvaged from the Great Sky Pilot dismantling. Not only that, but we played with the 60GHz gear with a member of Freifunk Saar who is in Portland for a Mozilla internship, for another week. It works as advertised and we were able to abandon it at Control H with the consent of the management. About a third of the aluminum rods got taken (they must be good for *something* and just melting them down seems like a shame) and we left the other 2/3 in case someone else has a brainstorm.

I don't think anyone took any pictures, but four of us convened at NodeKlickitat to disassemble most of the remaining SkyPilots this afternoon. We have four gateway devices and four extenders left intact. Thanks to all that helped out!

Tonight is the Annual Members Meeting. Personal Telco Project members will elect a person to the Board of Directors. Make your voices heard!

https://personaltelco.net/wiki/MeetingJuly2017

Hack Night at NodeKeegan this Wednesday!

Weekly meeting, tonight at Beulahland, 6:30 PM. Good times will be had.

Don't miss our October monthly meeting, tomorrow evening at 6:30 at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub!

Weekly meeting happening right now, over at the Goose Hollow Inn. Come on down!

We plugged in a couple new nodes this week:

https://personaltelco.net/wiki/NodeHayduke
https://personaltelco.net/wiki/NodeStreetRoots

Enjoy!

NodeHayduke - Personal Telco Project Node hosts interested in extending coverage, could be opportunity to mount on roof or maybe side of the building, a bullet and omni or sector antenna. I also suggested the possibility of extending network with a mesh of MR3201A's. Node hosts interested in making that happen. Not far from NodeMississ...