Community Network Handbook
A practical, opinionated guide to building community networks from scratch — even with limited resources.
This handbook is for anyone who has heard of community networks and wants to learn how to build one. It distills what we learned building them with AUCOOP — the good, the bad, and what we'd do differently — into practical steps you can follow in your own context.
Find your way around
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Read the story
A fictional but realistic journey: from the first router to a full deployment, one challenge at a time. The best place to start.
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Jump to the guide
Step-by-step technical recipes for every technology in the story. Self-contained — open the one you need.
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See a real deployment
How we built a network at a primary school in Gochas, Namibia — what we planned, what we found, what we changed.
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Contribute
This is a living book. Fix a typo, expand a section, or add your own deployment — even straight from your browser.
The principles behind this handbook
- Be practical: we focus on the how-to more than the why. There are many resources explaining the why, but few that explain how to do it step by step.
- On a budget: we show how to build community networks at low cost, using affordable or second-hand equipment and free and open-source software whenever possible.
- This is an opinionated guide: there are many ways to build community networks, and this is just one — the one that worked for us. We don't claim it is the best.
- This is a living book: it is designed to be easy to extend: add a Markdown file under
docs/, then link it frommkdocs.ymlso it appears in the site navigation.
Not just for community networks
Despite the name, this guide works for any small-to-medium network setup. We use "community network" terminology because that's the context it was born in, but the techniques apply broadly.