Atchison Village located in Richmond, California is a pilot community for the Internet Archive Community Wireless project.  Here, several residents in the community wish to access the free internet bandwidth being provided by the Internet Archive.

Residents that want to connect to access the service will need to obtain appropriate access point equipment.  The recommended equipment is listed here.  Equipment purchase, installation, mounting,  power, and maintenance is the responsibility of individual households.  Alternatively, these activities and expenses or may be coordinated as a cooperative project within the community.

The project will progress in phases.  The first phase was to enable wireless access at the central  Atchison Village Office (AVO) building.  To kick off the project, the Internet Archive (IA) has donated 3 sets of access equipment to the community.

The second phase will be to establish internet connectivity for five (5) households within the community.  During this second phase, the Internet Archive will complete the initial configuration of the access equipment and advise the installation team on its mounting and alignment.  However, other than supporting the initial installation during this early phase, the Internet Archive will have no further support or maintenance responsibility for the equipment. Further, the Archive will continue to be responsible for maintaining and operating the “backbone layer” equipment, as well as the connection of that backbone to the internet.

At the completion of the second phase, there will be an informal review of the project, and community planning for expansion will progress.

We will look at this program at the end of 2015 to see how it should be modified or, if it is not work well, terminated.