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Comment by jamesblonde | Hacker News Reader

Hi. I do research on Guifi.net (part of www.clommunity-project.eu), referenced in the article. Guifi.net has 30k+ nodes, and provides Internet access. We have also built decentralized services specifically for these type of "Community Networks" - including a decentralized search services, and a Video-on-Demand service (www.decentrify.io - to be released this month). Happy to answer questions.

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Does the mesh network have enough bandwidth to link distant cities, or do you just use the mesh for the 'last mile'?

For example, if there were mesh networks in New York and San Francisco (which are a few thousand miles apart) I would have thought the link would get congested quickly, if you could establish it at all.

If you use something else for backbone, what do you use and how many users does it support / how many users do you need to pay for it?

It's a mix of 802.11 directed antenna connections and now fibre linking up large areas with downtown Barcelona where the connection to the outside Internet is located. There are large valleys with poor 802.11 connections to Barcelona, and now many of them are getting fibre. Volunteers have learnt how to splice fibre and negotiate where to lay fibre :)

For revenue - there are about 20 ISPs who pay for QoS. Their contributions fund free internet for the other users. They get a guaranteed large share of the available outbound b/w.

This is very interesting, but I wonder: how do you guys handle abuses? Especially when it comes to sharing the home connection to the 'outer' Internet with strangers. Do you keep logs? If so, how do you handle the privacy part?

I think in part this is a problem that also Tor relay owners have (minus the log keeping obviously).

Sharing the home connection outside is encouraged, in fact. There are logs, of course. Individual nodes can be kicked out if needed, as all routing is BGP based.

Does each node hold a full BGP routing table? That could be a problem as the number of nodes increases

Nope. There are are domains. What's also interesting is that GPS coords are used extensively for joining domains and accessing services nearby. We have our own UNIX distribution now for cloud services. It's Called 'cloudy'

Totally awesome, thanks. Could you break down costs (ideally in dollars) for getting a network up and running. To clarify, how much would infrastructure cost initially for the setup and also to the end user. How much did it cost to connect those 30k nodes, how many people are served and what kind of speed and bandwith are you seeing?

Sorry to lob a ton of ?s at you but this is SUPER INTERESTING.

Thanks.

Ordinary users pay 59 euros (65 dollars) for a wireless access point. Typically they pay somebody 20 euros to install the directed antenna outside the building. For directed wifi connections, you can get up to 20-50 Mb/s or single digit Mb/s. Some links are very long - up to 10 kms. Obviously, over many hops it degrades, but most traffic goes to the Internet gateway right now - which is never too far. There are also users around the network with outside access who offer their machines as Internet proxies. Many of these are used, so a lot of traffic terminates inside Guifi.net at those points as well.

The cost was born by people who wanted cheap Internet. 65 bucks for free Internet.

Wow totally fascinating. Thanks for answering. Would be great to see this take off in NY.

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