It would already help if apartment buildings had an internal network with a single connection point, but I can tell you as someone who worked on this as a volunteer for student dormitories back in the day that ISPs are extremely hostile to the idea.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
179 points (94.1% liked)
Selfhosted
53228 readers
1996 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
afaik the Ruhr Universiry of Bochum has an intranet that connects the uni and all the dorms. And they selfhost a couple of services, like email, git and pastebin. You can see a line going to the dorms on the graph.
Yeah, German Universities have special direct internet access via the "Hochschulnetz". We had some pretty fancy 5ghz directional wifi connections over several km connecting to it, but it was fairly slow (shared 10 mbit), which made that impractical for most private internet use.
Some do, but that means you're locked in to whoever the landlord chooses for the ISP, and you can't call the ISP for support if you have issues.
No thanks, double-NATing is not my idea of fun when it comes to self-hosting.
ISPs should be regional users cooperatives everywhere. Rural areas in the US have local ISPs structured this way, but corporate ISPs have been trying to use regulation to make them illegal in normal service areas, which is disgusting.
I predict that point to point private fiber (currently used by high speed traders) will become more and more prevalent as issues with AI impersonation and spoofing become more prevalent, we should use this infrastructure drive to push linking co-op and public mesh networks using the same long-run conduit.
Why not a municipal service?
I always thought that the municipality should own the last mile. FTTP for every unit, then the ISPs could run their lines to a local POP and just cross-connect to the house, apartment or whatever that wants their services. That way it would reduce the infrastructure that an ISP needs and also increases the available choices for a customer.
Payment for the municipal last mile could either be leveraged via your taxes or a fee that is paid by the ISP (which inevitably would be paid by the customer anyway)
I'm ok with both, but prefer co-ops because the members get direct voting on large decisions by default, rather than a proxy vote via an appointed government worker who answers to the municipal government.
That said, there is no reason these can't be one and the same, the local government could fund the establishment of a regional co-op and maintain audit and some other limited authority over it.
I also support long-distance fiber infrastructure being built and maintained by worker's co-ops that would then get paid for service by the regional ISPs. Worker members would be highly motivated to maintain good uptime, and hiring/training members who live local to the fiber lines in remote regions would be possible with the incentive of worker ownership. Once built it is a long term maintenance and security business with steady return, perfect for a worker's co-op that could be financed with private capital at decent ROI.
There's Freifunk as well!
Nice! Thanks for posting this. Does it run on all wifi bands? Is there provision for mesh extension by wired Intranet?
As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I'm at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.
but I dream of a day when everyone’s wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood
A modern resurrection of the party phone lol. I remember those well.
Man it's been a hot minute since I was in my ham shack as a kid banging out code on a little 5 watt transmitter/receiver. There are a good handful of repeaters in this area and they are quite invaluable when we have climate related emergencies, or other. During the pandemic I would listen to the chatter. They definitely serve a valuable purpose. The general public doesn't really realize how these little ham shacks can be quite the boon in hard times and are usually surprised that they even exist.
There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I'm not really sure I'm ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
There is a user here that mentioned he is in funding talks for a local, independent ISP. I'm not really sure I'm ready to be connected to my neighbors intimately. Good fences make good neighbors.
Why do you think an independent ISP would operate any differently at the networking level on a per-customer basis? This is basic network segmentation, and my home gear can do that pretty easily. Throw each customer on their own vlan that's a /30 and they can't do anything more than talk from their node to the central router.
Good firewalls make good digital neighbors, and an independent ISP isn't going to survive long if Alice can access Bob's home network over the ISP without having something specifically configured in Bob's network to allow that.
Oh I get how it would all work, I'm not into sharing my network. lol I did have to provision a separate vlan for my lady friend when she comes over so she can get her fill of all the advertisements she wants, but, there are direct benefits of such a compromise in this instance. ;)
Oh I get how it would all work, I'm not into sharing my network.
See, I'm struggling to think that you do. You're not sharing your network with anyone. You're just hooking your uplink into someone else's network, who will take as much (or more, given how fucky current ISPs are) care to keep you and your neighbors from talking to each other without your own config letting it happen.
At the risk of being a contrarian, why would I want to hook my uplink to someone else's network, or vice versa?
why would I want to hook my uplink to someone else's network
Well, the biggest reason I could think of is that you want to access the Internet.
Your local network is only as good as the services you run, and most people don't self host. If you choose not to hook your uplink to your ISPs network, you're not gonna be able to do all that much.
I think you might be misunderstanding something here, because this is already how every ISP works - including the one you are using right now. Just on a bigger scale.
You're currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn't?
Definitely possible, and there is already some tech with the kinks worked out like wimax that could wirelessly serve a whole town. There are also folks who have created their own isps to fill in where the big players don't bother. It is apparently regulatory hell to get up and running.
The problem isn't technology, it's people.
It is apparently regulatory hell to get up and running.
By design, of course.
Cuba has their "Snet", a peer to peer mesh network of routers. It's pretty cool but it's gotta be crazy slow
You mention meshtaatic. There is also halow on the consumer side now. One of my goals for the next year is to set up a few open halow nodes in a mesh. As a local anarchist community network of sorts. With little or no intention of bridging it to the internet. Outside of connecting to other similar remote network segments or maybe an email/xmpp bridge. Mostly a separate local network with separate local resources.
Like every protocol in the unlicensed 900mhz range, 802.11ah has a very limited transmission rate in the 50 to 100 kbps range.good for occasional data like sensors or a few bytes of message, but not for any modern comma like AV, mass file transfer, etc.
It will of course varry by environment, topology, and configuration. As everything does. But even a megabit, 125KB/s leveraging modern technologies. Would be very usable. Capable of pushing DVD level streams of AV1 and opus though at saturation. More than easily able to push basic websites. High traffic probably not. But I wouldn't expect neighborhood/village traffic to be too heavy.
I've been watching halow for a while, I haven't yet seen any sustainable, real-world examples beyond a few hundred kbps (not bytes). I have seen the 1Mbps results, and they're promising, but most places with any other traffic in the free band is busy. If you have any successful and repeatable tests hitting at usable speeds, I'd love to see them.
After getting into meshtastic and a few other lorawan projects, I'm a bit concerned that tests for these are always high and visible, which doesn't work well in the mountains, even at shorter ranges.
I used to be more hands-on with these new standards, but I'll wait for better tests to come from halow before I try it out.
I've seen one. Not a great sample size. A YouTuber who also does a lot of mesh-tastic videos. Demonstrated live streaming from an ESP32 camera module in a large public park. High resolution low frame rate. As well as in a bridge configuration streaming YouTube from their apartment close to practical range limits. Roughly line of sight, minimal obstruction, of course.
Guaranteed success? No. But definitely something worth looking into investigating and replicating. Devices like these are much more accessible to your average person than ham certification and equipment.
I appreciate the response.
I'm still keeping an eye on these technologies and I hope we can set some decent standards for alternates to WiFi and LTE narrow band.
No worries. And I remembered the youtubers name. Data Slayer. He's got a few halow videos. 1Km and several Mbps is just about the baseline to be interesting. Lorawan range is great. But the data rate really is far too low for anything outside iot or im.
Some of the heletech modules look very promising and not unaffordable.
There is a solution to own your own IPv6 address. It is called Yggdrasil network. Your address is derived from keypair you need to generate at the beginning. All traffic is end to end encrypted with that keypairs.
There is also decentralized alternative to DNS - Namecoin, DNS based on blockchain.