Guifi.net

Guifi got its start when Ramon Roca, a Spanish engineer at Oracle, hacked some off-the-shelf routers. The hack made the routers work as nodes in a mesh network-like system connected to a single DSL line owned by Telefonica serving municipal governments. This jerry-rigged system enabled people to send and receive Internet data using other, similarly hacked routers, for free.

As word spread, Roca’s innovation to deal with scarce Internet access quickly caught on. As recounted by Wired magazine, Guifi.net grew its system through a kind of improvised crowdfunding system: “’It was about announcing a plan, describing the cost, and asking for contributions,’ Roca says. The payments weren’t going to Guifi, but to the suppliers of gear and ISP network services. All of these initiatives laid the groundwork not just for building out the overall network, but also creating the array of ISPs.”

Guifi.net established an affiliated foundation in 2008 to help oversee volunteers, network operations, and governance of the entire system. As Wired described it, the foundation “handled network traffic to and among the providers; connected to the major data ‘interchange’ providing vast amounts of bandwidth between southern Spain and the rest of the world; planned deployment of fiber; and, crucially, developed systems to ensure that the ISPs were paying their fair share of the overall data and network-management costs.”

Guiding the entire project are principles set forth in the [Fonn Compact], a “Compact for a Free, Open and Neutral Network.” The Compact declares that Guifi.net users shall have a number of rights and freedoms: • You have the freedom to use the network for any purpose as long as you don’t harm the operation of the network itself, the rights of other users, or the principles of neutrality that allow contents and services to flow without deliberate interference. • You have the right to understand the network and its components, and to share knowledge of its mechanisms and principles.

• You have the right to offer services and content to the network on your own terms.

• You have the right to join the network, and the obligation to extend this set of rights to anyone according to these same terms.

Guifi.net is financed by its users and their commitment to a shared infrastructure and mutulized benefits. Anyone who users the Guifi infrastrutrure in Catalonia – individual Internet users, small businesses, government, dozens of small Internet service providers – are committed to “the development of a commons-based, free, open and neutral telecommunications network.”

This has resulted in Guifi providing far better broadband service at cheaper prices than, say, Americans, who pay very high prices to a broadband oligopoly (a median of $80 month in 2017) for slower connectivity and poor customer service. ISPs using Guifi were charging 18 to 35 Euros a month in 2016 (roughly $20–$37) for one gigabite fiber connections, and much less prices for Wi-Fi. There are now more than 33,000 nodes in the Guifi.net system in Catalonia.