(Please note that this week's meeting is at 15:00)

Abstract

Guifi.net is a telecommunications network, open, free and neutral, built through an interconnection agreement where each participant can connect extending the network and obtaining connectivity. Starting from few nodes and wireless links in 2003, Guifi.net is currently a network of more than 27000 operational nodes adopting also fiber technologies. A lot of aspects of this effort are worthy of studying but governance and sustainability are one of the key factors in a grassroots project of this size. Thus, in this talk we are going to review the Commons principles and the economic model followed, that allowed such a rapid growth. We are also going to see how Guifi.net is now planing to take the Commons principles to the next level, investigating economical and technological models to create a Commons model for the Internet-eXchanges.

Proposed Quick Reading

Material for the Governing of the Commons Network and its economic sustainability
How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit

Proposed More in Depth Reading

DrPeering.net : Resources to make strategic peering decisions
A primer on internet exchange points for policymakers and non-engineers

Speaker Bio

Ramon Roca is one of the founders and the President of Fundació Privada per a la Xarxa Oberta, Lliure i Neutral guifi.net (The Foundation for the Open, Free and Neutral Network -guifi.net). He has always been involved in IT social projects. In 2003 he had set up the first link of what few months later became the guifi.net community network. That wireless link was his proposal to overcome the lack of ISPs Internet supply in his village located in the rural area in the countryside of Catalonia. Immediately after, he started promoting his solution among his neighbours and started enhancing the Free Networks' model. Nowadays he is repeating that process with optical fibre, deploying it according to what he has called the FFTF model, i.e. Fibre From The Farm, a wordplay to stress that the Fibre deployment is made by active common people, From The Farm, instead of by the telcos, To To The Home. This model, called as “Bottom-up Broadband initiative” by himself, was one out of eight selected ideas of the The Digital Agenda Stakeholder Day on 25 October 2010. His professional career has always been related to international IT companies.