Diverse initiatives around the world show the feasibility to build bottom-up community networking infrastructures to join the Internet. However, an experimental network by and for hackers has very different implications at all levels compared to a general-purpose production network for an entire population. Scalability in the design of community networks (CNs) makes the difference between clubs with entry barriers of complexity and limited service and extensible network commons able to accommodate and serve every user in an area. In this paper, we analyse the overall strategies and tackle scalability from what we consider the four main dimensions of CNs: social, legal, economic, and technological dimensions. We utilise the experience and lessons learned from guifi.net and other CNs to illustrate the discussion and the ways to achieve scalability in CNs.

This work was funded by the Beyond the Net program from the Internet Society, the EU netCommons contract H2020-688768, the Spanish Government contract TIN2016-77836-C2-2-R, the Generalitat de Catalunya as Consolidated Research Group 2017SGR-990 and the Industrial doctorate contract DI-006, the guifi.net Foundation, and the Association for Progressive Communications.

Peer Reviewed