Co-op Guerrilla Meshnets

[grarpamp]

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Not an example of distributed DIY co-op, but a story anyway...

McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the
Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the
poorest counties in the country. There’s a sit-down restaurant,
Opal’s, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic
light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen,
a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the
United States. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative
(P.R.T.C.), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley
County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the
coöperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. (By
contrast, where I live, in the mountains above Lake Champlain, we are
lucky to get three megabytes.) For nearly fifteen million Americans
living in sparsely populated communities, there is no broadband
Internet service at all.

Fibre-optic cables strung above a home in Jackson County, Kentucky,
one of the poorest counties in the country. High-speed broadband has
been used to bring Internet-based jobs to the region.
Before Shani Hays began providing tech support for Apple from her
home, in McKee, Kentucky, she worked at a prison as a corrections
officer assigned to male sex offenders, making nine dollars an hour.
After less than a year, she switched to working nights on an assembly
line at a car-parts factory, where she felt safer. More recently,
Hays, who is fifty-four, was an aide at a nursing home, putting in a
full workweek in a single weekend and driving eighty-five miles to get
there. Then her son-in-law, who was married to Hays’s oldest daughter,
got addicted to crystal meth and became physically abusive. Hays’s
daughter started using, too. The son-in-law went to jail. Their kids
were placed in foster care. Then Hays’s stepmother got cancer. “There
was a lot going on,” Hays told me. “I was just trying to keep it all
together.” She began working from home last summer, which has allowed
her to gain custody of her three grandchildren. (Her daughter has
since completed treatment for her addiction.) During Hays’s half-hour
lunch break, she makes supper. “I wouldn’t be able to do this without
the Internet we have here,” she said.