Havana's SNET: a resident-built city network, absorbed by the state
Disposition: stated (one ethnographic paper read in part in full; the measurement paper and the news reports from search text). Provenance: trail-2026-10-14, read 2026-10-14.
What it was. Without home internet, Havana residents built an isolated IP network from cables strung between houses and rooftop Wi-Fi gear (Nanostation-class antennas), organised in neighbourhood nodes ("pillars") under local and general administrators. It ran its own game servers, forums, a .snet domain space and hundreds of sites, and carried the weekly offline media bundle (El Paquete). The 2017 measurement study called it "the largest isolated community-driven network in existence", reaching tens of thousands of households; for most users it was the only network in the home (Pujol, Scott, Wustrow, Halderman, IMC 2017, abstract and intro from search text: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/papers/imc17-final186.pdf). Press estimates in 2019: ~40,000 users, nine large servers; rules banned politics and pornography (AP via https://latinorebels.com/2019/08/19/cubavideogamers, search text).
Its internal politics. An ethnography (46 interviews, seven nodes, 2015-17) finds the physical layout creates brokers: switch operators at chokepoints and administrators who enforce disconnections. Brokers on the city's thinner outskirts are more able to extract rent, because rewiring around them is expensive; yet the same brokers are more accountable, because everyone knows who they are. Distributed infrastructure "embeds the structural aspects of inequality" of its setting. See dye-snet-human-infrastructure-2020.
How it ended. Ministry of Communications Resolutions 98 and 99 (in force 29 July 2019) legalised private networks for the first time but capped wireless at 100 mW and barred cables across streets, which put SNET, by its physical form, outside the law. After protests (#YoSoySnet) the state Joven Club de Computación absorbed its services, and from February 2021 charged 20 CUP a month to ~28,000 users on the successor platform (AP above; https://wlrn.org/show/latin-america-report/2019-08-26/snarled-snet-seizure-of-cubas-underground-network-may-signal-cyber-crackdown; https://amicohoops.net/joven-clubs-will-start-charging-for-access-to-snets-wi-fi-networks, a reprint of a CiberCuba piece; all search text).
What it means for convivial technological futures. A third case of the same arc in the wiki: residents build a network the incumbent would not, at scale, and the centre absorbs it once it matters (farmer-mutual-telephones, Saskatchewan; ENAMI's sell-off in meller-enami-cepal-2021). The new element is the instrument: legality set by a technical parameter (transmit power, cable routing) rather than by a ban on ownership, which rhymes with Fischer's upgrade standards squeezing the mutuals. Dye's finding adds a caution for commons and porous-community: community ownership does not dissolve chokepoint power; it relocates it to whoever sits at the physical bottleneck, checked mainly by being known.
Related: thread-convivial-computation, theory-of-change, thread-transition