Editing Internet access (section)

===Non-commercial alternatives for using Internet services===
{{See also |Project Loon}}

====Grassroots wireless networking movements====
Deploying multiple adjacent Wi-Fi access points is sometimes used to create [[Municipal wireless network|city-wide wireless networks]].<ref>{{Citation | url = http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-and-learn | title = Discover and Learn | publisher = The Wi-Fi Alliance | access-date = 6 May 2012 | url-status = dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120510032811/http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-and-learn | archive-date = 10 May 2012 }}</ref> It is usually ordered by the local municipality from commercial WISPs.

[[Grassroots]] efforts have also led to [[wireless community network]]s widely deployed in numerous countries, both developing and developed ones. Rural wireless-ISP installations are typically not commercial in nature and are instead a patchwork of systems built up by hobbyists mounting antennas on [[radio masts and towers]], agricultural [[storage silo]]s, very tall trees, or whatever other tall objects are available.

Where radio spectrum regulation is not community-friendly, the channels are crowded or when equipment can not be afforded by local residents, [[Free-space optical communication#LEDs|free-space optical communication]] can also be deployed in a similar manner for point to point transmission in air (rather than in fiber optic cable).

====Packet radio====
{{Main |Packet radio|AMPRNet}}

Packet radio connects computers or whole networks operated by radio amateurs with the option to access the Internet. Note that as per the regulatory rules outlined in the HAM license, Internet access and email should be strictly related to the activities of hardware amateurs.

====Sneakernet====
{{Main |Sneakernet}}

The term, a [[tongue-in-cheek]] play on ''net(work)'' as in ''[[Internet]]'' or ''Ethernet'', refers to the wearing of [[sneakers (footwear)|sneakers]] as the transport mechanism for the data.

For those who do not have access to or can not afford broadband at home, downloading large files and disseminating information is done by transmission through workplace or library networks, taken home and shared with neighbors by sneakernet. The Cuban ''[[El Paquete Semanal]]'' is an organized example of this.

There are various decentralized, [[Delay-tolerant networking|delay tolerant]] peer to peer applications which aim to fully automate this using any available interface, including both wireless (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi mesh, P2P or hotspots) and physically connected ones (USB storage, Ethernet, etc.).

Sneakernets may also be used in tandem with computer network data transfer to increase data security or overall throughput for big data use cases. Innovation continues in the area to this day; for example, AWS has recently announced Snowball, and bulk data processing is also done in a similar fashion by many research institutes and government agencies.