Personal Telco Project: A Case Study in Community Connectivity

The necessity to work from home as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the need for fast, reliable and affordable broadband internet. It is indisputable: access to the internet is essential. There has long been an acknowledgment that the connectivity disparity in America is only serving to widen the income gap. However, before the term ‘digital divide’ was coined a small group in Portland, Oregon set about addressing the shortcomings in connectivity that their community faced. For the past twenty years, the Personal Telco Project (PTP) has been creating a network in Portland using a mesh system, whereby homes and businesses (hosts) would use their existing internet connection as a ‘node’, making Wi-Fi connections available to the public. As participation in the network grew, the speed and coverage of this network improved. I had a conversation with Russell Senior, President of the Personal Telco Project. We discussed the origins of the groups, the impact it had on Portland Internet culture and what they did to address the immediate needs of the community. We also looked at solutions to the broader issue of the digital divide in Portland.

Lewis: Can you tell me how the group got started? What was the pressing need at the time?

Russell Senior: It started as a result of three things: The dot com bubble had burst and tech workers who had been accustomed to what was at the time high-speed Internet in their offices, were suddenly at home, where they didn’t have fast Internet connections. The second factor was that Wi-Fi gear had started to become more accessible. You could go to a store and buy a router or a PCMCIA card and plug it into your laptop. Finally, the founder of the group, Adam Shand, saw an article on Slashdot about a group in London called ‘Consume.net’ where people were using Wi-Fi technology to create a community wireless network, and he was inspired to do something similar in Portland. That was in the year 2000, and that was the beginning of the Personal Telco Project.These people were realizing that the telecommunication infrastructure and the constraints that bigger operators were imposing, were not satisfying their needs, so they decided try to build an alternative infrastructure.

In 2003 we became a 501c3 nonprofit and the network was growing pretty rapidly. In 2005 we received a grant of about $15,000 to build an outdoor network in a low-income neighborhood along Mississippi Ave and asked for people to help. By chance, that’s when I started coming to meetings. I had been aware of the project for some time, but having young children left me short on time. Once my kids were a little older, I decided to get involved. At the first meeting, they announced they had just been awarded the grant from Meyer Memorial Trust, and issued a Call for Participation. I showed up at the kickoff meeting  with a GPS device and was immediately appointed leader of  the recon team which was used to go around the neighborhood and scout locations.

In the early days, our monthly meetings had several dozen attendees. Installs would draw a dozen volunteers. Over time, there was an attrition on membership as the network infrastructure had been built which was more labor intensive. PTP is currently an active group of about six people. Node hosts are a more passive kind of volunteer, and there are perhaps 50-60 of them

LWG: What were the technological challenges for PTP? RS: The primary barrier was the quality of open source drivers for wifi radios. In those days, Linksys WRT54G’s were commonly used, as you could put alternate firmware on them, but the big issue was that they had radios made by Broadcom, which had drivers that were not open source. As a result, you were pinned to a LINUX kernel, which allowed limited changes. The best option at the time was a series of radios made by Atheros that were open-source-ish. For the Mississippi Grant Project, the key feature we needed was WDS (Wireless Distribution Systems).

We were deploying single board computers in a little enclosure on the roofs of buildings and using 5GHz to do backhaul between the buildings and then a 2.4GHz a radio in the same box that would provide local coverage for devices to connect to.

LWG: Were there difficulties in finding hosts?

RS: It is difficult. Ideally, you would have some sort of friendly outreach person to go around and promote the network and tell people