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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Some things can be crowdsourced, but not cell towers. These are just gateways to an underlying infrastructure. Someone needs to manage the fiber to the towers. Someone needs to get the permits, hire the diggers and occasionally lobby various governments. That takes years and won't ever be done by a F/OSS volunteer backed by donations. There are things that corporations do well, or at least better than the general public.

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For a low data capacity network, I don't see why home data connections shouldn't work. I have a 130Mb connection at home, which would support plenty of voice calls simultaneously.

The real issue here is the control ISPs have over the networks. In my imagined future where we have crowd sourced cell towers, the tower operators have their own fiber connection at home that is essentially unregulated. Because that's a future I want for other reasons.

Unless you're paying for dedicated internet access, you likely don't "have a 130Mb connection at home". Or, at least you don't actually have full access to all 130Mbps all the time. Try using 100% of the capacity of your connection for an entire month and see if you don't get a call from your ISP.

Your basic home internet package of anywhere from 10-200Mbps is priced at a level which is consistent with a usage profile typical of most home users. A fiber drop to a cell tower has a much different usage profile over the course of a month.

Please, check your service contract before running for a month at capacity. A call from your ISP may be preferable over a bill from a tiered residential plan.

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