Dear EFF. I'm writing you in the name of Guifi.net. We have seen your post about the Open Wireless Movement[0] and we would like to introduce to you our project in the case you don't know it yet and manifest our wish to collaborate with you in the future of that project since we have common goals.
Guifi.net[1][2][3] is an Open, Free (as in free speech) and Neutral telecommunications network. It was born in 2004 in a small country called Grub in Catalonia, Spain. Its nodes are mainly placed in Catalonia but its taking more importance in other parts of Spain and more small work groups are appearing, which we help to grow. Every person or administration is responsible of its own tram of network. Nowadays we're proud to say we are the biggest wireless network in the world, having more than 12,000 nodes. Guifi.net have won several prizes and some years ago the Guifi.net Foundation was founded. It gives legal support and watches over the principles of creating a public telecommunications network. You can have a look to the map of nodes: World[4], Iberian Peninsula[5], Catalonia[6] and Castellón[7], for example. You can zoom in the map and see that every point is a node and every line is a link. The node color depends on the status of the node and this web interface helps users to administrate them. Guifi.net has not stopped with the wireless technology. Now we count with optical fiber links too by mean of deals with public administration and by the people that have helped to install it with their own hands. We call it FFTF (Fiber From The Farm) since it initially happened in Gurb, where there are farms :-). Spain is well connected by optical fiber, for example almost every highway has it below the ground. In the most of the cases the capacity that allows fiber is very much thrown away as it's only used for displaying messages in the middle of the highway panels or sending the photos of the cars exceeding the speed limit taken by radars in order to fine them... In this case our plans are introducing the project to the public administration and making them understand our open model to let us use the communication resources paid and built with public money. An important point to have into account is that the network is kept open, free and neutral by its principles thanks to the XOLN Commons license. Unfortunately we haven't translated it to English yet. We have versions available in Spanish[8] and Catalan[9]. Guifi.net is part of the Open Spectrum Alliance[10]. Guifi.net is also part of the CATNIX Internet exchange point and has peering agreements with other operators. Guifi.net Foundation is recognized as a telecommunications operator. Some people (very few at the moment) is taking advantage of the 1Gbps symmetric connection contracted at cost price. I could continue writing you a lot more about Guifi.net but I think this is enough for an introduction. You can find two presentations in English here. One of them was made for the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (ISCWN 2007)[12]. The second one[13] was made for the European Commission in Brussels and was presented by Ramon Roca, who is the president of the Guifi.net Foundation. We hope you find our project interesting. We are eager to hear about you and begin working together. Feel free to contact me as a bridge to Guifi.net. Sincerely, Pablo. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/open-wireless-movement [1] https://guifi.net [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net [3] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net [4] http://guifi.net/en/guifi_zones [5] http://guifi.net/en/IberianPeninsula [6] http://guifi.net/en/Catalunya [7] http://guifi.net/en/castello [8] https://guifi.net/es/ProcomunXOLN [9] https://guifi.net/ca/CXOLN [10] http://www.openspectrum.eu [11] http://www.catnix.net/en/membres/ [12] http://en.wiki.guifi.net/wiki/File:ISCWN2007.odp [13] http://en.wiki.guifi.net/wiki/File:Guifi.net-DA2020.odp _______________________________________________ guifi-usuaris mailing list [email protected] https://lists.guifi.net/listinfo/guifi-usuaris
