June Community Update

Over the last month, Althea organizers have been working to develop local partnerships and gain traction in their communities. Several organizers have chosen the “Altheahoods” approach to starting their networks, and have begun gathering pre-registration sign-ups prior to build out. Using social media and door-to-door canvassing, the hilltop organizers have gained traction at a brisk pace with 39 sign ups and several business have stepped forward to become relays or gateways there. In Newberg, Oregon they have focused their initial outreach on forming local partnerships and have a similar positive response and a healthy start of 10 sign ups. When the goal of 100 sign ups is reached, organizers will begin building the network and installing subscribers.

We also launched a new Altheahood last month in the Napa valley of region of California. Internet access in this rural area is expensive and very slow, well below broadband speeds. While there isn’t any fiber available to the consumer here, there is wholesale fiber connections which makes this a great area to start an Althea network. We recently published a blog post which gives some insight about how the economics of these networks can look.

This month, Jehan Tremback visited Berlin for Interchain Conversations, a Cosmos un-conference. Over the next few months we will be building the Althea token (ALGT) using the proof of stake Cosmos platform. Althea Governance Tokens will not be used to pay for bandwidth or monthly subscription fee, instead subscribers will still use ethereum, and soon dai, to pay for their bandwidth. Validators and those delegating Althea governance tokens to them will earn transaction fees from each payment. We talked about Cosmos, links in Clatskanie, and chatted with hilltop organizer’s Bee and Ann about their deployment in our last live community call, which is available on youtube in case you missed it.

Justin Kilpatrick has been busy working out increasingly nuanced software bugs and rolling out the latest Beta 6 release, which will include a simple “neighbors” tab showing connected users.  The previous release included the highly requested bandwidth payment tracking to the dashboard where subscribers can view their usage and payments. Justin also recently gave a presentation at the NANOG conference and shared a fun video about Althea performance with CoDel.

The Althea founder team will be in San Francisco for a meetup in July -  details to follow soon. If you are ready to start an Althea network in your community or want to learn more about what that entails, visit our updated getting started guide or sign up to be an organizer at www.althea.net.