Making Community Networks economically sustainable, the guifi.net experience

Community networks have flourished around the world as a complementary model for enabling access to the Internet and its services. Nevertheless there is still an on-going debate on how to make them sustainable and scaleable beyond the voluntary effort and non-refundable contributions. The approach taken by Guifi.net has been to enable professional activity and to develop a set of tools to ensure the reinvestment of a fraction of the benefits of this professional activity. This has contributed to build the largest community network, with an annual turnover of millions of Euros and creation of dozens of direct jobs. The implementation of these tools is producing extensive data sets that allow to characterize key parameters in the deployment and the operation of these infrastructures, to examine behaviours and trends and to identify good and bad practices, fraud, etc. A more detailed knowledge of the economic aspects has a positive impact on reducing the uncertainty of investments, expansion plans and operations.