I know this has been discussed in the forum already so I thought the following info might be of interest to some of you. I had a call today with Dr Bart Braum, who is in charge of research for a European Community Lab project. It is a mesh network providing Internet to communities in mostly rural areas. This size of these networks is pretty amazing, the Greek network currently has around 10,000 nodes running and the one in [Catalonia] (Catalunya | guifi.net) is also well established . These nodes run with an uptime of between 70 and 80% and the distance between some of the nodes can be as much as 60-70km, as they gain access to the broadcasting masts of local TV companies, who provide their resource in return for the community providing access to their roofs. In some cases these communities are starting to joint fund their own cable, through EU grants.
In addition to the nodes running in people’s homes, the project also has access to nodes for researchers and companies to use (http://communitylab.blog.pangea.org/). The nodes can be accessed free of charge (for good honest Open Source companies like MaidSafe) and maybe a good way for SAFE to be tested (once stabilised) out with our current provider.
So a really amazing project that is getting to a pretty decent size. The values of this project are very aligned with SAFE and they are very keen to work with us, we’ll keep you updated with progress.
