Today, we completed another secure wireless hot-spot install for Culture House. This time, the hot-spot is available at the Somerville public library. Culture House was constructing an outdoor pavilion there for Somerville residents and guests to use during the remaining months of the pandemic. Santos Carrasquillo, a Cambridge resident, recently joined Mass Mesh and took the lead installing this secure wi-fi hotspot.


The install team.


Mass Mesh is a volunteer-led organization focused on building community mesh networks in Boston and the surrounding area. Using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, Mass Mesh builds home-grown Internet infrastructure. Its aim is to give communities the tools they need to communicate securely online on their own terms.


The hardware we installed.


This installation had to be weather-proof, which was a new requirement for us. We handled it by arranging a small telco box, and installing our sensitive hardware in that. The radios we use are already weather-proof, so we were able to mount those outside (not shown in the image above.) In the end, we installed the following hardware:

  • 1x Ubiquity Nanostation M5 (To connect to the library wifi)
  • 1x Ubiquity UAP AC Mesh (To broadcast our secure wi-fi)
  • 1x Raspberry Pi 4 (To connect the outside network to the Yggdrasil network)


All in all, the installation went smoothly. You can stop by the outdoor pavilion at the Somerville library any time during 2021. Thank you to Santos Carrasquillo for leading this install, Ward Vandewege for stopping by to save the day with some troubleshooting help, and James O’Keefe for being there to capture some of the day’s activities on video.


If you’re interested in volunteering to build a more equitable and secure Internet, please get in touch. We need both technical and non-technical volunteers. volunteer@massmesh.org