Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer

guifi·net is a technological, social and economic project built by citizens, which centers its activity in the field of telecommunications. Its purpose is to enable broadband Internet access for everybody, with high quality and for a fair price, by means of developing a telecommunications network based in a model of commons, open, neutral and with unencumbered access. The network counts with more than 32,000 nodes and gives access to an estimated 50,000 people, mostly in Catalonia and the Valencian Country. guifi.net counts on a diverse community of individuals, organizations, companies and public administrations agreeing upon a common license, with the support of a private foundation that watches over its development and integrity. guifi.net enables a collaborative economy where volunteers and businesses contribute to the development of the common network thanks to governance tools like the compensations system.

The Community-Lab testbed helps community networks provide and manage their own infrastructure to support cloud-like service provision and realistic experimentation in network technologies.

Developed by the CONFINE project, the Community-Lab testbed pushes the envelope of FLOSS technologies (OpenWrt+LXC Linux containers, open REST APIs over Django, tinc+IPv6 mesh networking…) to provide community networks with free/libre software and knowledge that enable them to run realistic networking experiments and support cloud-like service provision on top of self-provided and self-managed computing and networking infrastructure. CONFINE also participates in major FLOSS projects related with community and mesh networking (OpenWrt, qMp, bmx6, OLSR, DLEP…) together with some of the largest community networks (AWMN, FunkFeuer, Guifi.net).