LoTek Coordination

LoTek Coordination

About this site

A public, read-only window on LoTek’s community networks, for the stewards who look after them and for anyone curious about how a neighborhood runs its own internet.

What this is

LoTek builds low-cost, community-owned mesh networks for the neighborhoods the market decided were not worth wiring. LoTek provides open hardware, installation training and legal support; residents own and govern the network. Today 64 communities run their own, connecting 210,412 residents, with no subscription fees, no data caps and no one selling their traffic.

This site is where those networks are coordinated. Stewards use it to see which nodes need attention, compare notes across networks and find the playbooks and hardware designs they work from. It is read-only and public: nothing here can change a network, and every network’s state is open to its members and to everyone else.

LoTek is a program of Frothly, based in Newark and led by J. Bone, who helped build the first network in 2008. Read about the program, or hear him describe it on Audio Logs.

How monitoring works

Every node answers a poll from its own network’s collector every five minutes, reporting whether it is up, the quality of each of its links, a single counter of bytes passed and, for hubs, the state of its battery. Each network’s collector sends a summary here. Uptime is the share of the last 90 days that a network’s nodes were reachable.

Nothing about what members do online is collected: no traffic contents, no destinations, no usage by household. The what we measure playbook sets out exactly what is kept and for how long.

Nodes are located by grid square on a schematic, never by address, and stewards are named by first name and initial.

What each status means

Operational
Every hub is up and at least 97 percent of the network’s nodes answered the latest poll.
Online
The node answered the latest poll and its links are healthy.
Degraded
Working, but not as it should: a hub on battery, a weak link, or more nodes than usual offline.
Maintenance
Planned work is under way. Members are told in advance at the monthly assembly.
Offline
The node has not answered a poll. Usually a power cut or a host’s switched-off socket; occasionally a fault.

Since 2008

Seventeen years, block by block.

  1. 2008

    Neighbors in Bridgeside, Newark, put secondhand radios on eight roofs along a single block and mount a relay under the old bridge. LoTek begins.

  2. 2009

    Lister Flats becomes the second network, the first built around hubs and the first to adopt a governance charter.

  3. 2016

    Calumet Row in Chicago wins the first city pole permit granted to a LoTek network, and the Lamppost street node is designed for it.

  4. 2018

    Las Mareas in San Juan is built to run without the grid, and the Cellar solar power module is designed for it.

  5. 2020

    Ironside goes from first meeting to switch-on in eleven days, as schools close. Five networks are built that year.

  6. 2025

    Frothly publishes Mesh at the Margins, drawing on seventeen years of LoTek operational data.

  7. 2026

    Ashland Park, the sixty-fourth network, is installed by more than 200 volunteers in a single weekend.

Further reading