The citizens of Detroit are building their own Internet
in 1996, we created the Seattle Peoples' Internet by co-locating our equipment at an upstart internet cafe in Belltown called Speakeasy.<p>The deal was that we paid for their most expensive monthly line item: the T1 circuit.  We covered 100% of the T1 yet were allocated only 50% of the bandwidth, if I recall.  We recruited enough co-op members to cover that fee before beginning and had a wait-list on Day One.<p>Our PortMaster was configured to monitor monthly bandwidth consumption per co-op member.  We accommodated spikes in traffic of individual members, but if the aggregate went above some threshold, the co-op would pay more to Speakeasy.   The intent here was that our overage fees would help pay for a second T1.<p>We also had some co-location hosts in their rack, which was around the corner from the coffee machine in those days.<p>Member fee schedule was proportional to type/speed of connection used and anticipated usage.  Beyond that, membership was at cost.<p>Internally, co-op members would resolve financial details among ourselves, and we sent one payment check per month.<p>The agreement was fairly balanced.  It allowed our members physical access to reboot a piece of co-located equipment, but any maintenance required pulling and removing the machine.  (Again, rack was in tight quarters of a coffee shop.)<p>Since this was mid-1990's, all members supplied their own pair of modems for each side which were mostly 28.8 back then.  I think one person was going with ISDN, and maybe another had Telebit Trailblazer 56k.<p>I'd like to think that upon seeing how this was a benefit to the cafe's financial statements that it gave Mike, Gretchen, Chris, et al the idea to move into the larger ISP space for which they then became known.