"There's no internet here!"

You arrive at the community center. There's electricity, there are people, there's enthusiasm — but there's no internet.

Maybe there's a local ISP that can run a cable. Maybe someone has a mobile data plan you can share. Maybe there's a satellite link available. Whatever the source, the first step is always the same: get a connection, any connection.

But the router the ISP gives you? It's a black box. You can't configure it properly, you can't see what's happening, and it only covers one room.

But that's fine, we just treat the ISP router as a black box, it's not worth the cost to get into the operator's router and understand it. We just don't care about the ISP, they just provide internet connectivity to our community, that's all we need about them. And this is very important because you don't want to have vendor lock-in, and quickly be able to use the best value connectivity, that's it.

Let's put a simple example: there is a rural community where there is only internet accessible via ADSL, but suddenly an operator brings 4G connectivity at good price, you want to easily change it without your network even noticing it.

So you need your own router — one you control.

For that our way to go is OpenWrt. In a nutshell OpenWrt is "Linux, but for routers". So it's extremely recommended (and that's what the guide is based on) to use OpenWrt routers. The next chapters will guide you on what router select and how to put OpenWrt on them.

Next steps:

• What router should I even buy?
• What is OpenWrt and why should I care?
• I think I bricked my router. What now?