guifi.net in Arte Channel

Text: Gurb in Spain, 1002 km to Brussels

The NSA scandal almost makes us laugh

I started Guifi.net

so we can provide ourselves with Internet connection.

Here in the middle of the Catalan nowhere a digital revolution started 10 years ago.

Ramon and his neighbors have built their own broadband network,

because the big commercial providers had no interest in connecting villages and their vicinity.

Today, Guifi.net is one of the greatest alternative networks worldwide.

I want to show you where the cables merge together:

right here.

This rack is the equivalent of

a telephone switchboard in a village.

It is a bit dirty because this is actually my garden shed.

What it can do is impressing.

I can't say it precisely now,

but these are the routers of some 5000 households.

In a free wireless network,

the participants are connecting among each other and not via Internet providers.

They can directly share data with each other, chat, write e-mails

- a decentralized network that the users control themselves.

Thereby their data is secured from access by strangers.

Meanwhile, the "Internet guerillas" are even able to roll out their own fiberlines.

Today, Ramon's colleagues are working since 3 AM.

We all know that the government operates slowly.

We can't wait until laws solve everything.

In any case this is also comfortable for us.

With regards to communication, we can do or not do whatever we like.

The builders of Guifi are financing their network themselves.

The users, like here the hospital of Vic, are buying once the connections to the fiberline,

after that, they can use the infrastructure free of charge.

So far there was no provider available, that was able to deliver broadband network access,

like we need it in the three hospitals.

This is the advantage of Guifi.

Also the services they provide.

And it is also cheaper.

It's true, this is quite important.

Even more important, Ramon and the Catalan free network people

are protected in their Internet against the surveillance of NSA & Co.

Text: Catalan free network meeting [guifilab]

But on EU-level, free networks like this are no subject of interest.

There they missed the connection a long time ago:

the laws are from the 90s,

And aand the planned reform of data protection laws does not take off.

Anyway we have to

tie the European laws and the interests of citizens together.

This makes our structures more robust

thus strengthening our freedom.

At least the European parliament is pressing to finally pass the reform of data protection laws.

They should unify the laws in EU. But a merely technical reform is not enough for Ramon.

Important is not the laws,

important is the spirit behind those laws and that here people works together and most important:

we have to act against the big economic interests.