Become a Founding Member-Owner
The Milwaukee Mesh Cooperative is closer every day to providing fast, affordable, net-neutral internet to Milwaukee and beyond. Purchase a lifetime consumer share today, or set up a recurring donation towards your lifetime member-ownership through our donate button below!
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Mission
We live in a digital age. The internet has forever changed the way we work, socialize, organize and live. Access to the internet has become a basic necessity, which has led to the formation of monopolies and cartels among the corporate Internet Service Providers (ISPs.)
The Milwaukee Mesh Network seeks to make the internet more accessible, more affordable and subsequently faster, by democratizing the process of distribution. We are a distributive, consumer and worker-owned internet service cooperative.
We intend to create a neutral internet that is accessible to all. Long term, the Milwaukee Mesh Cooperative will be a vital part of a larger solidarity economy that empowers working people.
Why join the Milwaukee Mesh Cooperative?
Members of a distributive mesh network enjoy many technological and social benefits.
- The Milwaukee Mesh Cooperative is inherently net neutral. With no commercial Internet Service Provider looking to profit from your browsing habits, the network treats all data equally, without throttling or commodifying your traffic to any site. This in turn protects the privacy and security of all data sent over the network.
- For similar reasons, mesh networks are less expensive than commercial internet access, while still providing speeds which are competitive, if not faster than typical commercial service.
- Mesh networks are structurally more robust than a commercial ISP, since there is no single point of failure which can shut down the whole network.
- Mesh networks build community. The technology shows the strength of non-hierarchical systems in practice, and the Milwaukee Mesh Cooperative particularly champions popular democracy in its structure, giving all members a means to directly participate in the cooperative’s governance.