A community network for Rochester, NY
Rochester can own a piece of its own internet.
ROCTheNet is a wireless network being built rooftop by rooftop across the city, and owned by the people on it. No contracts. No customer accounts. No data collected about you.
Find your way in
Three ways to join the network
Connect your home
Tell us where you are. If one of our rooftop antennas can see yours, volunteers mount a small dish and bring ordinary Wi-Fi inside. A roof with a long view helps your neighbours too.
Getting connectedBuild it with us
Comfortable on a ladder, curious about networks, or both? Do your own install with our guides, help on other people's, or work on the network itself. All of it is documented in public.
Volunteering and DIYBuildings and property managers
One connection for a whole building: a line to every unit, each apartment on its own network, and Wi-Fi in each if you would like to provide it. Or host a rooftop antenna for the neighbourhood.
A custom connectionHave gigabit fibre?
Anchor an island
Some neighbourhoods are out of sight of any rooftop we can reach. A fast home or business connection can carry one onto the network over an encrypted tunnel, until radio gets there, and none of that traffic ever leaves under your address.
- One isolated port on your network
- Outbound only: nothing forwarded, nothing inbound
- Translated out of our own address space, not yours
- A bandwidth cap we set ourselves, lowered when you ask
How the signal gets to you
Line of sight is the whole trick
If two roofs can see each other, they can be linked with a radio. No carrier's permission, no cable in the street, no franchise agreement.
Downtown
A data centre with a 10 Gb/s connection and our own address space: the one place the network pays for bandwidth.
Tall rooftops
Panel antennas on tall buildings, each covering a wedge of the city. One good roof reaches thousands of homes.
Your roof
A small dish, about the size of a dinner plate, aimed at a rooftop it can see. One cable carries its power and your traffic.
Your home
That cable comes inside to a router, and from there it is ordinary Wi-Fi. Same phone, same laptop, same TV.
And sideways
Rooftops link to each other too, so traffic has more than one way home. As the network thickens it keeps working when a piece of it does not, including when an outage takes the commercial internet down.
And sometimes, a tunnel
Where no rooftop can see a neighbourhood yet, we can join it over a volunteer's own fast connection. Same addresses, same service, same promises, but it runs on one household's circuit and goes down when that does. We will always tell you which kind of connection you are being offered.
What it costs
Not free to run. Never a bill.
There is no contract and no company behind this, only donations and grants. So members pay for their own hardware, and people who can, chip in every month.
About $250
Once, for your install hardware: the dish, a router, cable and a mount. Members generally cover their own. Apartment buildings cost more, and vary with what the building wants.
Monthly
Membership is a suggested $30 a month, which keeps the downtown connection paid and the next rooftop going up. Give what the connection is worth to you.
Nobody
is turned away for not paying, and nobody is disconnected. Suggested means suggested. What we ask is that people who can, do: that is the difference between a network that reaches the next block and one that stops here.
Where this actually stands
The honest state of it
Last updated 26 September 2026. This site went up at the very beginning, on purpose.
- Done
Our own address space, on the internetAS402668 announces our IPv4 and IPv6 space, for now from a small cloud server that does the data centre's job until the rack is built.
- Secured
Data centre space downtownRack space with a 10 Gb/s connection and room for community servers, with badges in hand.
- Under way
The first islandOur first node, a test bench in West Henrietta, is joining the network over an encrypted tunnel.
- Under way
Rooftop sitesTalking to the owners and managers of tall buildings, downtown and on the ridges east and west of the river.
- Under way
The hardware fundRaising for the first rooftop sector: radios, mounts, cable and rigging.
- Open
VolunteersPeople comfortable on a roof, network engineers, grant writers, and neighbours who will knock on doors on their own block.
- Not yet
Member installsThey follow the first rooftop sector. Get on the list now and you will hear the day there is one that can see your roof.
The deal, in four lines
A network that belongs to the people on it
We adopted the Network Commons License, the agreement NYC Mesh uses and Guifi.net's before it. Paraphrased:
Use it for anything
As long as you do not take that same freedom away from anyone else.
Look at how it works
Whenever you like. Nothing about the network is a secret from the people on it.
Offer and use services
On the network, on whatever terms you and the other person agree.
Pass it on
If you join, you extend the network to the next person on the terms you were given.
In practice: we do not inspect, log, throttle or sell your traffic; we do not turn away anyone we can reach; and every part of how this is built stays documented in public, including the decisions we have not made yet.
Questions people ask
The short answers
Is this legal?
Yes. We use unlicensed spectrum, the same bands your home Wi-Fi uses, with better antennas and at higher power, within the limits the FCC sets for those bands. No licence is required, and none can be revoked.
Do I have to be technical?
No. Volunteers do the install, and what arrives in your home is a router and ordinary Wi-Fi. If you are technical, everything about how the network works is published and you are welcome in it.
How fast is it?
It depends on your path. A clear line of sight to a nearby rooftop can expect a few hundred megabits; a long or partly obstructed one gets less. It is shared capacity, not a guaranteed rate, and we would rather tell you the honest number for your roof than advertise one.
What do you do with my data?
Nothing. We do not inspect it, log it, throttle it or sell it, and there are no customer accounts. Every radio hop is encrypted. It is not end-to-end privacy, and no internet connection is: use HTTPS, as you already do.
One honest caveat: answering an abuse complaint on shared addresses is in tension with keeping no records at all. The board is writing that policy down before the first member is connected, and it will be published here.
What about a Rochester winter?
The links that matter run at 5 GHz, which rain and snow barely touch. Ice on a dish and wind on a mount are the real winter problems, and they are why mounting is done properly or not at all.
Can I keep my current provider?
Yes. Nothing about joining asks you to cancel anything, and running both for a while is a sensible way to find out how good your path is.
Everything goes to a real person
Usually within a day or two. Tell us your neighbourhood and cross streets, and whether you can see downtown or a hill from your roof or top-floor window. No obligation, and no cost to be on the list.