Skip to content

Motivation

Connectivity is not a luxury — it's a right. Yet millions of people around the world still lack reliable internet access, especially in rural and underserved communities.

Community networks are an answer: locally built, locally owned, and locally maintained networks that bring connectivity where no one else will.

The connectivity gap

The places that need connectivity most are often the last to get it. Commercial operators rarely extend their networks into sparsely populated or low-income regions — the subscriber base is small and the infrastructure is hard to justify on commercial grounds. So the gap doesn't close on its own. It falls to local communities, and to the organizations that support them, to close it.

A community network is exactly that: instead of being owned by a company, it is built and run by the people who use it. It relies on affordable equipment, free software, and the time and knowledge of volunteers rather than a large budget.

Why this handbook exists

This handbook was born from real-world experience building community networks in places like Senegal and Namibia, through AUCOOP — a student cooperation group at the UPC that has been doing this kind of work for almost two decades.

After many projects, we kept hitting the same three walls:

  • The knowledge was scattered. What we learned on one deployment lived in someone's personal notes, a half-finished wiki, or just in the memory of whoever happened to be there. The next project started almost from zero.
  • Every newcomer started from scratch. Because there was no single reference, each new volunteer had to rebuild the same understanding — and in a student group, people rotate out every year, taking the unwritten parts with them.
  • There was no shared toolset. Each project picked its own hardware and software, so volunteers from one deployment couldn't easily help another, and a finished network became hard to support once its original team moved on.

Existing documentation didn't fix this for us. It was either too academic, too fragmented, or assumed resources and knowledge that simply weren't available on the ground.

This handbook is our attempt to fix all three: one place, written so a newcomer can use it from day one, committed to one clear, mostly open-source toolset so future projects build on the same foundation instead of reinventing it.

Start small, learn by doing

One of the biggest mistakes we kept repeating (and still sometimes do) was spending too much time planning and thinking about how to do things, instead of just getting started and learning by doing.

When starting a community network, it's easy to get overwhelmed by everything that needs to happen: planning the network architecture, choosing the right hardware, setting up software, organizing the community, and more. That's why this handbook follows a different approach: we focus on practical steps to get a basic network up and running as quickly as possible.

The idea is to start small, with a simple setup, and then iterate and improve over time.

Again, we're not saying this is the best way to do things — just one way that worked for us. The important part is to get started, learn from experience, and adapt as needed. Don't be afraid to make mistakes; they are an essential part of the learning process.