Windy days. 115 Km/h in some regions of Catalonia and, as you can tell by images on the news, some “material” damage and some personal loss have to, unfortunately, be acknowledged.

fallen trees due to strong winds in catalonia - from vilaweb.cat

Spain is a rather strange country where, when it rains (not a big shower, but just some apparently innocent raindrops…);

1) Trains do not work properly (Mostly those run by RENFE).

2) Blackouts (FECSA / ENDESA) are common and, therefore, tend to threaten all your power devices with a high voltage returning power supply which, if you are not aware of, will literaly burn some of your fridge, radio, tv, pc pluged devices.

3) Everyone takes the car to drive by any loctaion. So, traffic jams are expected everywhere.

The same, but worse, occurs when we have; snow, strong winds, fog or any combination of them.

WiFi is known to be altered by water, resulting in a loss of signal penetration. Humidity / fog being it’s principal enemies. That is why some people at the Czech Republic do link their WiFi devices with optic antennas, which is just great!

Optical link antena form free tech. project RONJA used by free wireless community CZFree in České Republic

Nevertheless, while waiting for the promise of generalized WiMAX, strong winds have put in the forefront one of the many advices Susan Leigh Star wrote about infrastructure in her 1999 article entitled; “the ethnography of Infrastructure” which bluntly is;

- “Infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown”

Illustrators such as David Macaulay had previously done a great job showing the ring of the beast or, else, the invisible infrastructure. See; “underground” for instance.

Again, some happy hurricanated winds come to remind us how dependent we are of already existing infrastructures (hello from the missing masses front!)

RAX!

Yesterday I learnt about a hacklab located in Madrid (Spain) named hamlab. They are attempting to run a GSM network for free. They do that under a R+D license and with a gsm machine, Ettus, affordable for 300 Euros aprox. The GSM machine redirects to a local Asterisk server. And that should do must of the trick (w/ OpenBTS).

At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) held in bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany, you could get some info about GSM workarounds. See;  http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/GSM.

gsm directional directional antenna. from antoniotomas.com

Now, this is interesting because it confirms the ongoing trend to move and experiment towards a Citizen Management of Technology. Once was Free Radio Air Waves, Then TV signals, WiFi and it seems that now GSM is targeted. Great. But, why would anyone bother to do so? well, here are some reasons;

a) Affordable prices for tech pieces and components

b) Networked Knowledge about highly specific skills. (How to’s and Man pages – which, btw, constitute a great example of what Pierre Levy understands as a movement of virtualisation-actualisation of knowledge)

c) Frustrations with existing telecom infrastructures.

d) A Will to play with machines. Just the fun of it.

e) A Will to innovate.

f) A claim for a right to the city (following Henry Lefebvre term);  We may propose here a right to infrastructures.

Certainly something to keep thinking about for my thesis…

RAX!

Winter Holiday and people at guifi.net does not seem to slow down. They keep meeting on Thursdays (indeed, recently Tuesdays) at guifilab (sort of wifi workshop to learn and test new stuff with an open invitation to anyone interested) in Barcelona. They first started to meet at a hacklab called riereta.net, they moved to Infospai (a sociolopitical center) and some times to la Quimera: Kernel Panic (another hacklab). As such, guifilab is more likely to be a grouping of people that can be summoned upon different locations and that will start talking and making the agenda to foster free and neutral (as they put it) wifi networks.

One of these workshops dealt with the issue of network architecture and protocols for Barcelona. As many other wifi initiatives, guifi.net relies on nodes and supernodes transmitting / receiving data. These nodes are being set up with special firmwares (you can see a recommended list here; http://www.guifi.net/firmware. dd-guifi stands for a custom version of dd-wrt) and they usually follow a master-client approach to get linked via roof tops.

Nevertheless, as Barcelona orography is dissimilar to “rural” Catalonia ones, some wanted to try mesh networks to see if that worked better for a high density of nodes scenario. “Dit i fet” (“told and done”; a popular catalan expression).

Following previous experiences like people at freifunk, we profited from the visit of one of his members, Axel, to start tunning some routers / AP into mesh artifacts with BATMAN inside. Previously, in 2007, at the SAX annual meeting, they had Elektra sharing knowledge about it too.

As a result, between a lapse of one moth aprox., they have already started a working mesh network in some neighborhood (Gracia). You can see a map here; http://merry.biruji.org/gsf/mapa/ (Be aware that this map is not listing all guifi nodes, it only shows meshed ones)

The speeding up process these people are carrying out is really astonishing. If one thinks they started at a remote location in Gurb and now do extend to more than 7.000 km one can not stop himself wondering how

[btw, it is no secret they have become members of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) by now]

Now, how will mesh network be integrated to master-client already existing infrastructure? Will this technical innovation lead to more people connected to guifi? Does it simplify the connection process for non-that-expert users? It is a choice in the network routing protocols facilitating or hardening the way citizens can manage urban infrastructures -as wifi- by themselves?

Are Technological Zones (to use Andrew Barry  terminology) between freifunk (Germany) and guifi.net (Catalunya) being shaped at this particular moment when a protocol locally designed in Germany profiting form globally spread programming knowledges is actualized in local machines in Gracia neighbourhood? (languages boundaries, or zones, remain though… However, Germany and Catalonia are not linked, yet, by wifi, that is why I use the verb “to shape” as a means to state that it is not already there but somehow you can see the shadow of something being elaborated approaching)

RAX!