For households
Connect your home
If one of our rooftop antennas can see your roof, or a top-floor window, you can be on the network. Here is what that involves, from the first email to Wi-Fi in your kitchen.
How joining works
Four steps
Get on the list
Send us your neighbourhood and cross streets, and what you can see from your roof. There is no obligation and no cost to be on the list.
We check the view
We look for a rooftop antenna your roof can see, and a volunteer may ask to come and look. If you rent, we talk to the owner and sign a short rooftop licence with them.
The install
Volunteers mount a small dish, run one cable inside, and set up a router. For most homes it takes a morning, and nothing is drilled into a roof without the owner's say-so.
You are on
Ordinary Wi-Fi, with an IPv4 address and a whole block of global IPv6 addresses behind it. Keep your current provider as long as you like while you find out how good your path is.
What it takes
A view, a cable and some hardware
- A line of sight from your roof, a balcony or a top-floor window to one of our rooftop antennas. Trees and taller buildings in the way are the usual problem, and we will tell you straight away if yours is one.
- About $250 of hardware, once: the dish, a router, cable and a mount. Members generally cover their own install hardware. You are welcome to bring your own router instead of one of ours.
- The owner's permission if you rent. We ask for it, and we put what we are asking in writing.
- Membership is a suggested $30 a month. Nobody is turned away for not paying, and nobody is disconnected.
What you get
- A shared connection: a few hundred megabits on a clear, nearby path, less on a long one. We tell you the honest number for your roof.
- Your own network. What your Wi-Fi is called, and its password, are yours; we never set or record them.
- No logging, no throttling, no selling of your traffic, and no customer account to keep a record of.
- Encryption on every radio hop, so nobody with an antenna on a hill can read your traffic out of the air.
- A voice in how it is run, and the right to look at how every part of it works.
Have a roof with a view?
Your roof can bring your neighbours on
A house on a rise, a tall three-decker, a roof that can see a long way: a spot like that can carry a radio for the homes around it. Tell us what you can see from up there. If it is a big building, the page for buildings and property managers is the one for you.
Questions
Before you sign up
Why do I pay for my own hardware?
Because there is nobody else to pay for it. The network has no revenue and is not meant to: the licence forbids profiting from other members, so it runs on donations and grants. Rooftop sectors cost a few thousand dollars each and the downtown connection is a bill every month, so donations go there, and each member's own dish and router are theirs to fund. Apartment buildings are different, and the buildings page says how.
What does the monthly donation pay for?
The downtown connection, which costs the same every month whoever donates; the rooftop sites; and the spare hardware that gets a neighbourhood back on the air the day something breaks. Every dollar goes into the network.
I'm in the suburbs. Is there any chance?
Possibly, sooner than radio can reach you. Where a neighbourhood is beyond any rooftop we can see, we can sometimes join it over a local volunteer's fast internet connection. Everything you see is the same: the same addresses, the same service, the same promises about your traffic. The honest difference is that it runs on one household's circuit and goes down when that does. If you have a fast connection yourself, anchoring an island is how you could be that household.
Is a dish on my roof my responsibility?
No. We install it and we look after it, and you can ask us to take it down at any time: that permission is yours to withdraw under the licence. What we ask in return is roof access when something needs a visit, and a call rather than a ladder if something looks wrong.
Is the connection encrypted?
Every radio hop is, from the dish on your roof to every link behind it. That stops strangers reading your traffic out of the air and helping themselves to the network. It is not end-to-end privacy, and no connection you have ever had was: traffic is decrypted and re-encrypted at each hop, so use HTTPS, as you already do. Which cipher each rooftop runs is published, because you are entitled to know.
Can I use my own router?
Yes. The network hands your router a normal internet connection, IPv4 and IPv6, and what happens after that is yours. If you would rather have one of ours, we have a short list of routers we know well.