Building Cyber Bridges

            In a world where people around us are connected to the Internet with blazing 200 mb/s download speeds, it’s strange to hear about a small island, Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington finally catching up with 25 – 30 mb/s all thanks to Chris Sutton. Sutton, a software engineer with experience in network management, created a wireless network with radios on top of trees to link the homes of Orcas Island to a radio tower on their water tower, which would then link the island to a microwave tower on Mount Vernon.

He tested the signal strength from the tops of trees with drones mounted with radios. When the drones flew up, they would try to access the rest of the network, and if it could, a radio would be set up on top of the tree. These radios currently link up about 50 residents of Orcas Island to 30 – 40mb/s with little to no interruptions.

            The small island was fed up with their local ISP CenturyLink, which already had the reputation of having service outages for days at a time. Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said. It was a 10-day outage that was the last straw for the island. With the help of local residents and an anonymous, interest free $25,000 loan, Sutton created the Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA). Residents paid $150 to become members of the DBIUA and $75 a month for Internet service, which goes toward paying down the loan. The monthly fees also cover the $900 a month DBIUA pays StarTouch Broadband Services for bandwidth.

            The process starts with a tree hooked up with a box with DBIUA equipment, and Power over Ethernet (POE) cables going up the tree to the radios. The POE cables also go from the box back to the closest power source, typically located  in someone’s home. This box creates the connection from that house to the network.  The home will have a power brick that provides power into both the Ethernet cable and the outdoor equipment, with each radio needing about eight watts of power.

The network is slowly growing, Sutton being aware to the fact that adding too many people at once would slow down the network for everyone. He opted to, rather, wait and reinforce the network before he adds more people. He has estimated that he will have around 100 users by the end of the year.

            Although this seems like an almost impossible task, Sutton describes it as “easy” and “surprised other places in similar situations don’t do the same thing.” Making Sutton proud, two brothers from Brooklyn set up Brooklyn Fiber, a service to provide Internet to their community. This led to the volunteer project Red Hook Initiative to buy Internet service from Brooklyn Fiber and provide free Wi-Fi to the community.  With the success of Sutton, it can pave the way for other people to similarly create Internet connections in rural, less accessible places.