Making Community Networks economically sustainable, the guifi.net experience

Baig, Roger; Dalmau, Lluís; Roca, Ramon; Navarro, Leandro; Freitag, Félix; Sathiaseelan, Arjuna

doi:10.1145/2940157.2940163

Cited by 28 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…They deliver their services through the network's infrastructure and receive payment from their customers. At the same time, they can contribute infrastructure and invest money to the CPR or compensate the network for using it [5].…”

Section: Cns As Open Access Network Instances: the Commons Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Commercial service providers offer services over the CN and charge the CN users as typical customers, but also subsidize the CN growth and maintenance subscribing to the commons policies. This way, the CN maintains its non-profit orientation and pursues its sustainability through synergies with entities undertaking commercial for-profit activities [5].…”

Section: Support From Public Agencies and Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Direct reciprocity mechanisms can be described in various contexts such as in sharing network connectivity or storage and computing resources. The compensation tables in guifi.net is a key resource to ensure the economic sustainability of the network, ensuring a cooperative and cost-oriented model to share the recurring costs and balance investment, maintenance and consumption [5].…”

Section: A Enforcing Fairness In Users' Contributions and Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Guifi.net, a representative example of this category, involves private sector actors that provide commercial services in the CN. To this end, it has set forth additional mechanisms for compensating contributions of different stakeholders i.e., compensation system, provision of donation certificates [5].…”

Section: A Enforcing Fairness In Users' Contributions and Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Community Networks and Sustainability: A Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Micholia

Karaliopoulos

Koutsopoulos

et al. 2018

IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials

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Index Terms-Community networks, sustainability, incentive mechanisms.Abstract-Community network (CN) initiatives have been around for roughly two decades, evangelizing a distinctly different paradigm for building, maintaining, and sharing network infrastructure but also defending the basic human right to Internet access. Over this time they have evolved into a mosaic of systems that vary widely with respect to their network technologies, their offered services, their organizational structure, and the way they position themselves in the overall telecommunications' ecosystem. Common to all these highly differentiated initiatives is the sustainability challenge. We approach sustainability as a broad term with an economical, political, and cultural context. We first review the different perceptions of the term. These vary both across and within the different types of stakeholders involved in CNs and are reflected in their motivation to join such initiatives. Then, we study the diverse ways that CN operators pursue the sustainability goal. Depending on the actual context of the term, these range all the way from mechanisms to fund their activities and synergistic approaches with commercial service providers, to organizational structures and social activities that serve as incentives to maximize the engagement of their members. Finally, we iterate and discuss theoretical concepts of incentive mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature for these networks as well as implemented tools and processes designed to set the ground for CN participation. While, theoretical mechanisms leverage game theory, reputation frameworks, and social mechanisms, implemented mechanisms focus on organizational matters, education and services, all aiming to motivate the active and sustained participation of users and other actors in the CN.

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Section: Cns As Open Access Network Instances: the Commons Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Support From Public Agencies and Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Enforcing Fairness In Users' Contributions and Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Enforcing Fairness In Users' Contributions and Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Community Networks and Sustainability: A Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Micholia

Karaliopoulos

Koutsopoulos

et al. 2018

IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials

Self Cite

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“…1 https://guifi.net/ The idea of CMNs, nobel as it seems, does not come with out its fair caveats. Since the nature of CMNs is peer-to-peer there are concerns related to trust among various participating peers and how to make this volunteer effort economically viable and sustainable as well [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Blockchain-enabled Wireless Mesh Networks

Selimi

Kabbinale

Ali

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains for Distributed Systems

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Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate internet access and make connecting to the Internet not only easy, but affordable too. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory, quantify its performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless mesh access networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLF deployment made in a production wireless mesh network.2 https://fundacio.guifi.net/Foundation

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Blockchain for economically sustainable wireless mesh networks

Kabbinale

Dimogerontakis

Selimi

et al. 2019

Concurrency and Computation

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Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low-cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content, and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means that every participant can invest in resources and pay or be paid for usage to recover the costs of network devices and maintenance. While mesh networks and mesh routing protocols enable self-organized networks that expand organically, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts enable the economic coordination among network providers and consumers. We explore and evaluate two existing blockchain software stacks, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and Ethereum geth with Proof of Authority (PoA) intended as a local lightweight distributed ledger, deployed in a real city-wide production mesh network and in laboratory network. We quantify the performance and bottlenecks and identify the current limitations and opportunities for improvement to serve locally the needs of wireless mesh networks, without the privacy and economic cost of relying on public blockchains. KEYWORDS blockchain, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, mesh networks, performance evaluation INTRODUCTIONNetwork infrastructures are critical to provide local and global connectivity that enables access to information, social inclusion, and participation for everyone. Local connectivity largely relies on access networks. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are a kind of access networks comprising of wireless nodes, namely wireless mesh routers, wireless mesh clients, and network gateways. A client (connected through WiFi or wired to a mesh router) can access the Internet across a WMN. 1 These are self-organized networks that can grow organically: new network links can expand the coverage of the network or increase the capacity when links get overused. The routing protocol runs in every router by measuring the performance and quality of links and coordinates distributed decisions about the best network paths periodically. As a result, once a routing protocol is adopted, the development and operation of the network only depends on pooling routers and links with local decisions, without any central planning or management.These decentralized networks are essential to develop community access networks, network infrastructure commons, built by citizens and organizations which pool their resources and coordinate their efforts, characterized by being open, free, and neutral. 2 These decentralized access networks have been identified as one way to connect the next billion people that are still without the Internet access. 3 Guifi.net* is an example of such a community effort, which is one of the biggest commun...

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Making Community Networks economically sustainable, the guifi.net experience

Cited by 28 publications

References 6 publications

Community Networks and Sustainability: A Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Community Networks and Sustainability: A Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Towards Blockchain-enabled Wireless Mesh Networks

Blockchain for economically sustainable wireless mesh networks

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