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Concept
Wireless community network
Summary
Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.
Many of these organizations set up wireless mesh networks which rely primarily on sharing of unmetered residential and business DSL and cable Internet. This sort of usage might be non-compliant with the terms of service of local internet service provider (ISPs) that deliver their service via the consumer phone and cable duopoly. Wireless community networks sometimes advocate complete freedom from censorship, and this position may be at odds with the acceptable use policies of some commercial services used. Some ISPs do allow sharing or reselling of bandwidth.
The First Latin American Summit of Community Networks, held in Argentina in 2018, presented the following definition for the term "community network": "Community networks are networks collectively owned and managed by the community for non-profit and community purposes. They are constituted by collectives, indigenous communities or non-profit civil society organizations that exercise their right to communicate, under the principles of democratic participation of their members, fairness, gender equality, diversity and plurality".
According to the Declaration on Community Connectivity, elaborated through a multistakeholder process organized by the Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity, community networks are recognised by a list of characteristics: Collective ownership; Social management; Open design; Open participation; Promotion of peering and transit; Promotion of the consideration of security and privacy concerns while designing and operating the network; and promotion of the development and circulation of local content in local languages.
Official source
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