Audio Logs 47: Room Service

Julian Pankratz

This is Audio Logs. I’m Julian Pankratz. Seventeen years ago this summer, on the longest day of the year, a handful of neighbors in Newark switched on a few secondhand radios and stopped waiting for anyone to wire their block. I’m speaking with J. Bone, who leads LoTek and helped build its first network in Newark in 2008. Welcome.

J. Bone

Good to be here, man. Long way from the rooftops.

Julian Pankratz

You’ve come all the way from Newark. Was it strange, getting on a plane you didn’t build yourself?

J. Bone

Ha. Don’t give me ideas. No, it’s good. Nice studio. I keep looking up at your ceiling, though, figuring out where I’d put a hub.

Julian Pankratz

I’ll clear it with facilities. Before we go any further, for anyone who’s never come across LoTek, what is it, in a sentence or two?

J. Bone

We help neighborhoods build their own internet. Radios on the roofs, talking to each other, sharing a connection out to the rest of the world. The residents own it and the residents run it. No subscription, no data caps, and nobody selling your traffic. We bring the hardware designs, the training and the lawyers. They bring the roofs.

Julian Pankratz

And the neighbors.

J. Bone

The neighbors are the whole thing. The gear’s the easy part. I’ll probably say that a few times today.

Julian Pankratz

I have to ask about the episode title. You suggested “Room Service.” Why?

J. Bone

Years back we took in a guy who was having a very bad week. Big shot, used to hotels, used to everything being done for him. First night in the neighborhood he’s standing on a roof, shouting that he wants room service. Somebody handed him a ladder and a radio. That’s room service here. You want it, you build it.

Julian Pankratz

Did he help?

J. Bone

Eventually. Everybody helps eventually.

Julian Pankratz

What made it such a bad week, if you don’t mind my asking?

J. Bone

He was carrying a lot more than he should’ve been. In his head, I mean. Too much, for too long. Jones helped him out with that, actually. But that’s a long story.

Julian Pankratz

And one you’re not going to tell.

J. Bone

Not on a podcast. But the name stuck. To this day, the number you call in Newark when something’s broken, the fault line, everybody calls it room service. You call room service, a steward gets back to you inside a day, and nine times out of ten what you get is somebody at your door with a ladder, asking if you’d like to learn how to fix it yourself.

Julian Pankratz

Before LoTek, though, before there was any network, you were already under that bridge. You ran a radio station there.

J. Bone

An unlicensed broadcast station. People like to say pirate radio, but that makes it sound like I had a boat. I had a transmitter, a car battery and a lot of opinions.

Julian Pankratz

What were you broadcasting?

J. Bone

Whatever the neighborhood had to say. Music, sure. But mostly it was people. Somebody’s landlord shut off the heat, they’d come down and say so on the air. Church announcements. Who had a room for rent. The regular stations didn’t cover our side of the river unless something was on fire. So we covered it ourselves.

Julian Pankratz

And the authorities?

J. Bone

We had some correspondence. Let’s leave it there. Funny thing is, now I’m the guy telling everybody to stay inside the power limits. Every link we run is legal, and every licensed one is filed. Nobody on a LoTek roof touches the power settings. If your link’s weak, you find a better path or you add a node. You don’t turn it up.

Julian Pankratz

The poacher turned gamekeeper.

J. Bone

Something like that. But that station taught me the two things I needed. How radio really behaves, line of sight, what one wet tree does to a signal. And that people will show up for something if it’s theirs.

Julian Pankratz

Tell me about that first network.

J. Bone

One block. A few secondhand radios, some borrowed tools and a relay we mounted under an old bridge, because from under there you could see every roof we cared about. Nobody’d driven over that bridge in years. The phone company had told us for years we weren’t worth upgrading. So we stopped asking.

Julian Pankratz

Paint me the picture. What did a secondhand radio look like in 2008?

J. Bone

Home routers. The kind people threw out when they upgraded. We’d put our own software on them, hook up antennas we pulled off whatever we could find and seal the whole thing in a plastic sandwich box to keep the rain out. Mostly kept the rain out. Eight of those, on eight roofs along one block. And for the relay, two old satellite dishes, hanging off the underside of the bridge, pointed by hand.

Julian Pankratz

By hand.

J. Bone

One guy under the bridge with a dish, one guy on a roof with a laptop, yelling numbers at each other across the street. Took most of a day. We switched it on June twenty-first. The longest day of the year. That wasn’t poetry, by the way. We just wanted all the daylight we could get.

Julian Pankratz

And the relay got a name.

J. Bone

Heaven. The residents named it inside the first week. It hangs up there under the deck where nobody can see it, and every message on the block goes through it. So, Heaven. It stuck.

Julian Pankratz

Is it still there?

J. Bone

Still there. Still Heaven. Node number one. Truth is, there’s not much of the original left. That first dish ran eleven years before we swapped it, and just about every part’s been replaced since. It’s like your grandfather’s axe. New head, new handle, still grandpa’s axe. Runs on solar now, because under there it’s a long way from anybody’s socket.

Julian Pankratz

Does it still pull its weight?

J. Bone

Spring of 2021, when everybody was stuck at home, it moved three hundred and twenty gigabytes in a single day. Busiest day any one of our nodes has ever had. Not bad for something that started out as a pair of junked satellite dishes.

Julian Pankratz

And the signal work?

J. Bone

That was Jones. Smartest one of us, no contest. Jones could pull a clean signal out of noise like nobody I’ve ever met. Retired now, with honors. We still talk about Jones like a founding member, because that’s what Jones was.

Julian Pankratz

Where did Jones come from?

J. Bone

The Navy, originally. Did signal work there for years before coming to us. Jones got licensed on the Turing Registry the day before we switched on, so that part, at least, was all above board. Worked the links on that network for seventeen years and retired last September. Somewhere with a lot more water and a lot less noise.

Julian Pankratz

You put Jones in the acknowledgments of your paper, Mesh at the Margins.

J. Bone

Had to. There wouldn’t have been a network without Jones. Wouldn’t have been a paper either.

Julian Pankratz

Let me sum up for listeners where we are. Summer of 2008, one block in Newark, eight roofs, a relay under a disused bridge called Heaven and a signal analyst named Jones. What happened next?

J. Bone

The folks across the avenue watched us get through our first winter, and the next spring they wanted one too. That was Lister Flats, the second network. And they did two things we hadn’t. They built it around hubs, one strong radio up high serving a lot of roofs, instead of everybody hanging off a single relay. And they wrote their rules down. A charter. Every network since has started from a copy of what Lister Flats wrote in 2009.

Julian Pankratz

What did the first hub look like?

J. Bone

Three of our rooftop radios bolted to a steel frame, with a car battery in a picnic cooler for backup. I’m not kidding. And it worked. That’s the story of the hardware, really. Every revision on our hardware page is a story about something that went wrong on a roof. A lightning season in Paterson, so now every node has a surge arrestor and a proper ground. Stewards sick of climbing a ladder just to see if a node’s alive, so now there’s a status light you can read from the street. After the hurricane, Las Mareas in San Juan needed hubs that kept running when the grid didn’t, so we built a solar battery module. Now every hub has one.

Julian Pankratz

So the hardware learned from the neighborhoods.

J. Bone

The hardware is the neighborhoods’ notes. And it’s all open. Anybody can build it.

Julian Pankratz

Was there a moment when you realized this wasn’t just one block anymore?

J. Bone

Spring of 2020. The schools closed, and in Ironside, back in Newark, a third of the kids had no way to get to class from home. First meeting to switch-on was eleven days. Stewards from the other Newark networks came over, a whole lot of neighbors with them, everybody in masks, one roof at a time. That was when I knew. It wasn’t us building networks anymore. It was networks building networks.

Julian Pankratz

Seventeen years later there are sixty-four LoTek networks. What makes one last?

J. Bone

Not the gear. The gear is easy. Networks die when the two people who understand them move away, or when one big repair comes along and there’s no money. So every network elects stewards, keeps a maintenance fund, trains new people every month and has a legal home, a co-op, something that outlives any one of us. Do those four things and you’re fine.

Julian Pankratz

Is that instinct, or do you have numbers?

J. Bone

Both. Last fall we put out Mesh at the Margins, seventeen years of data from every network we’ve got. The ones that did all four of those things were three times as likely to make it to ten years. And the uptime surprised even me. We beat the commercial service we replaced. Ninety-nine point two percent, against ninety-seven point eight. And we don’t have an operations center.

Julian Pankratz

How is that possible?

J. Bone

Because you’ve got dozens of neighbors who notice within minutes when a node goes down, and half of them know how to fix it. An operations center is three states away. Molly’s across the street. Molly’s been a steward on Bridgeside for years. You want to know how Heaven’s doing, don’t ask me. Ask Molly.

Julian Pankratz

And the money? Who pays?

J. Bone

Everybody chips in what they can to the maintenance fund, usually three to ten bucks a month. The median works out around four dollars a household. The commercial service those same neighborhoods had before cost sixty-eight. And it’s in every charter: nobody gets disconnected for not paying. Ever. One household, one vote, whether you put in ten dollars or nothing.

Julian Pankratz

Let’s talk about the newest one. Ashland Park, in East Orange, switched on in June.

J. Bone

Oh, man. Ashland Park. Thirty-four hundred households, told for years they weren’t worth it. Same old story. So all winter they came to our workshops, once a month, learning to climb, crimp a cable, read a signal. In April they held a founding assembly, adopted their charter and elected five stewards. Then the last weekend in May, more than two hundred volunteers went up on the roofs. A hundred and forty nodes in two days.

Julian Pankratz

In one weekend.

J. Bone

One weekend. We’d reworked the firmware in the spring so nodes could join up in any order, because you can’t choreograph two hundred people on a hundred and forty roofs. Sunday night the mesh was forming on its own, nodes finding each other one by one, and you can see that status light from the street. So you’ve got families standing on the sidewalk at eleven at night, looking up at their own roof, waiting for it to come on. And then cheering. For a light. I’ve been doing this seventeen years and that one got me.

Julian Pankratz

And did it hold up?

J. Bone

Mostly. Over twenty-one hundred households connected the first week. We learned some things, too. When a hub restarted, the roofs around it took their sweet time finding their way back. Our firmware people had a fix out about three weeks later. That’s the deal. Every network teaches the next one something.

Julian Pankratz

I have to confess, the thought of two hundred people on roofs makes my palms sweat. How do you keep everyone safe?

J. Bone

Three rules, and every installer learns them on day one, in order. One, nobody gets hurt. Not you, not your partner, not somebody on the sidewalk. Two, do what the host asks, unless that means somebody gets hurt. Three, look after the equipment, unless that breaks rule one or two. A radio you can replace. Nobody climbs alone, ever. And before every climb, you and your partner read the checklist out loud. Weather, access, ladder, harness, tools, phone. The installers call it the litany. It’s printed inside the lid of every hub.

Julian Pankratz

The litany. I like that. Though I should say I hold an honorary title from a minor noble house. We don’t really do roofs.

J. Bone

You do now. Come out to Newark, we’ll put you through the workshop. By your first climb you’ll be saying the litany like a choirboy.

Julian Pankratz

As a former touring musician, I’ll have you know I’ve carried amplifiers up staircases that would frighten a mountain goat.

J. Bone

Then you’re halfway there.

Julian Pankratz

And it changes how people use the internet?

J. Bone

Completely. When it’s yours, you use it for your own stuff. Tenant meetings, the corner store’s orders, the kids’ homework group, the neighborhood board. People stop thinking of the internet as something that happens to them and start thinking of it as something they run.

Julian Pankratz

Is there a moment that sums that up for you?

J. Bone

When we did the research, we asked people to describe their network. Hardly anybody talked about speed. They said, it’s ours. And for a lot of those blocks, that was the first time anybody could say that about any of the pipes and wires running past their front door. It’s private, too, which matters. We don’t log anything. Our monitoring counts bytes, not people. A node tells us it’s up and how busy it is. Who you are and where you went, nobody writes that down, so nobody can come asking for it.

Julian Pankratz

You’ve also had some unexpected collaborators. I gather you wrote a paper with Miranda Lawson, who leads our Lazarus archive.

J. Bone

Keeping old radios alive. Yeah. Miranda’s people bring dead machines back for a living, and we’ve got radios on roofs that have been out in the weather for years and still working. Turned out we had a lot to say to each other. She is scary precise. I mean that as a compliment.

Julian Pankratz

Advice for a neighborhood thinking about starting one?

J. Bone

Find the roof with the best view and the person with the most patience. Then call us. We’ll bring the ladder.

Julian Pankratz

And if they’re nervous about knocking on doors?

J. Bone

Go in pairs, wear a badge, keep it short. Tell them you’re neighbors, their roof has one of the best views on the street, and would they kindly let you take a look. Leave them a sheet with your names on it and go. Never push. Half the people who say no this year say yes next year, once the roofs around them light up.

Julian Pankratz

J. Bone, thank you.

J. Bone

Anytime. Stay connected.

Julian Pankratz

That was Audio Logs. J. Bone’s paper, Mesh at the Margins, is in our research library, and the playbooks, the open hardware designs and the live status of all sixty-four networks, Heaven included, are on the LoTek site. We’ll be back in two weeks.

Room Service

Transcript