Slashdot Mirror
Engineer Gets Tired Of Waiting For Telecom Companies To Wire His town -- So He Does It Himself (backchannel.com)
Gurb, 75 kilometers north of Barcelona, is a quiet farming community of 2,500. It has suddenly become a popular place, thanks to being the birthplace of Guifi.net, one of the world's "most important experiments in telecommunications." It was built by an engineer who got tired of waiting for Telefonica, the Spanish telecom giant, to provide internet access to the people of his community. At first he wanted an internet access for himself, but it soon became clear that he also wanted to help his neighbors. Guifi has grown from a single wifi node in 2004, to 30,000 working nodes today, including some fiber connections, with thousands more in the planning stages. An article on Backchannel today documents the tale of Guifi. From the article: The project is a testament to tireless efforts -- in governance, not just in adding hardware and software -- by Ramon Roca (the engineer who started it) and his colleagues. They've been unwavering in their commitment to open access, community control, network neutrality, and sustainability. In 2004, he bought some Linksys WiFI hackable routers with a mission to get himself and his neighbors connected to the Internet. This is how he did it: Roca turned on a router with a directional antenna he'd installed at the top of a tall building near the local government headquarters, the only place in town with Internet access -- a DSL line Telefonica had run to municipal governments throughout the region. The antenna was aimed, line of sight, toward Roca's home about six kilometers away. Soon, neighbors started asking for connections, and neighbors of neighbors, and so on. Beyond the cost of the router, access was free. Some nodes were turned into "supernodes" -- banks of routers in certain locations, or dedicated gear that accomplishes the same thing -- that could handle much more traffic in more robust ways. The network connected to high-capacity fiber optic lines, to handle the growing demand, and later connected to a major "peering" connection to the global Internet backbone that provides massive bandwidth. Guifi grew, and grew, and grew. But soon it became clear that connecting more and more nodes wasn't enough, so he created a not-for-profit entity, the Guifi.net Foundation. The foundation, thanks to its cause and a cheerful community, has received over a million Euros to date -- from various sources including several levels of government. But as the article notes, a million Euros is a drop in the bucket next to the lavish subsidies and favors that state-approved monopolies such as Telefonica have enjoyed for decades. The article adds: The Guifi Foundation isn't the paid provider of most Internet service to end-user (home and business) customers. That role falls to more than 20 for-profit internet service providers that operate on the overall platform. The ISPs share infrastructure costs according to how much demand they put on the overall system. They pay fees to the foundation for its services -- a key source of funding for the overall project. Then they offer various kinds of services to end users, such as installing connections -- lately they've been install fiber-optic access in some communities -- managing traffic flows, offering email, handling customer and technical support, and so on. The prices these ISPs charge are, to this American (Editor's note: the author is referring to himself) who's accustomed to broadband-cartel greed, staggeringly inexpensive: 18 to 35 Euros (currently about $26-$37) a month for gigabit fiber, and much less for slower WiFi. Community ownership and ISP competition does wonders for affordability.
Contrast this with the U.S. broadband system, where competitive dial-up phone access -- phone companies were obliged to let all ISPs use the lines as the early commercial Internet flourished in the 1990s -- gave way to a cartel of DSL and cable providers. Except in a few places where there's actual competition, we pay way more for much less.Read the story in its entirety here.
False. What telecoms — correctly — object to, are efforts by local governments to compete with them. Private businesses, individuals, or non-profits are fine...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Local governments, you must mean those things made up of the people in the community joined together ( in theory) for the common good? A sort of co-op like thingy?
Actually, they'd have lawyered him to death over right of way as soon as the first cable appeared. That is if they didn't beat him to death with franchise agreements first.
I work for a small city Telco (Tbaytel) in Canada. We're one of the few left in Canada created when the original founders of our city ended up disliking Bell and ended up covering a large area of NorthWest Ontario. Internet here is actually pretty good at reasonable rates and completely without download or upload limits. The only real limitation is speed depending on service but otherwise it's a reasonably good service. The competition between Tbaytel and the National Telco's is fierce but it has resulted in better services and savings I believe. The city owns the telco so a fair chunk of profits goes back to our community. So yes, it isn't impossible to have a provider that's partially government / commercial that isn't a complete rip-off to consumers.
My local muni which is in the middle of republican paradise fought for years to build there own Fiber ISP. They were finally allowed to do so because they span it as a boon to the local tech economy.
Well, it has been here for about 5 years and it is glorious. $55 per month for symmetrical 60Mbps, no caps, no blocked ports, no downtime, no special modems or routers required. They come and set it all up and give you a single RJ-45 for you do with as you please.
All this and it is making the city money. Not a lot, but that is how it should be.