✳ NOTE
Three roofs make a mesh
A cash-floor, two-year plan makes the 25-mile Network El Segundo horizon concrete
Network El Segundo has published Mesh Commons, a practical two-year plan for a community-owned local network centered in El Segundo. The least-expensive honest start is not blanket coverage. It is three consented rooftops, three directional paths, one donated service computer, and local things neighbors want to use before an internet gateway exists. The first measured two-roof link has a $295–$395 hardware floor: two $65-class outdoor radios, a small router, outdoor cable, surge and grounding allowances, and a light mounting contingency. The first redundant triangle is budgeted at $950–$1,500. The year-one hardware floor is $3,000–$5,000; the 24-month floor is $9,500–$15,000 for 12–20 roofs and four to six hubs, assuming donated access, power, compute, and volunteer labor. Professional roof work, engineering, permits, insurance, tower rent, unusual mounts, and internet backhaul are excluded. The operating rhythm borrows from NYC Mesh: potential nodes enter a map, safe panoramas establish line-of-sight candidates, equipment is bought only after viability, and mature clusters keep at least two directional uplinks. Local DNS makes hello.mesh, map.mesh, play.mesh, bbs.mesh, radio.mesh, library.mesh, drop.mesh, garden.mesh, and atelier.mesh useful during an upstream outage. Twenty-five miles is a planning horizon, not a coverage claim. Any 15–25 mile proof path waits for permissions, rooftop height, a spectrum survey, and Fresnel clearance. The network is free at the point of local use, supported by suggested $5–$20 donations or volunteer time, and logs health metrics rather than browsing history or message content. No active physical mesh, internet service, emergency network, certified design, site survey, or installation authorization is represented as live.
