Democracy was originally born in Athens, it happened a long time ago, in the ancient ages, at least something like that somebody told while I was young at school... and also I learned about some remarkable ruins from those ages. What nobody told me is that today, if you go there, you'll still be able to smell that flavor if you sniff Athens open air. This is the largest free network built by citizens, commons based which I have ever seen (sorry Mercè, guifi at Osona could be just the 2nd at the best, or at least awmnb.net is largest in some metrics). And this is absolutely live and contemporary.

My lack of Cyrillic understanding of what I was reading at the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network website before the meeting a was already suggesting to me that I could experiment a very nice surprise. After the meeting, I tell you, no deceive.

Shared points

It's amazing to see how starting from each part of our common Mediterranean sea, working simultaneously in parallel and facing similar challenges, as a result we share tons of similarities (between awmn.net and guifi.net). The biggest shared point is the main focus: Cutting the edge of scalability in free networks to make them available to thousands of members, which means that I'm talking about self service web applications for network provisioning, mapping tools, network topology (a lot of this collected in the WiND application), pragmatic approach but still open to the future evolution, non-profit organization committed to commons style networking,... etc. Share knowledge But the best comes when you start to listen this enthusiastic people. They accrue large amounts of knowledge and experience, and are happy to transfer this treasure to others. Nothing strange with this, is simply how it works. That quickly triggers a fluent interchange of ideas.

Looking forward for the Mediterranean Cluster of free  networks.

In technology, clustering means better scalability and robustness. One of the first things which comes up to everybody minds is quite obvious. We should keep in touch, tunnel and route our networks, share experiences and align developments when makes sense. As a result: A gigantic cluster can be easily built across all the Mediterranean. Some of those things can be easily addressed in the sort term, other might take a while and require, but... exciting, isn't? Besides some easy things like tunneling, the most interesting opportunity which I think we have is to come with drafts on the CNML and use it as an enabler for services interoperation like on maps, graphs...

Tips & Tricks

Before forgetting something, I would like to write down some of the snapshots which attracted my attention:

• Coming from urban areas, the community has much more “human bandwith” than coming from rural areas, and spontaneously work all together as a very active hive. Just like how it has to be.
• AWMN is very accurate and polite while using the unlicensed spectrum in order to don't pollute the air. They trend to lower output power as much as possible without losing performance, sometimes even set the radios at 1db, they also discard the usage of OFDM modulations on the 2.4GHz band. They told me that non-OFDM (802.11b) is more efficient. It's easy to see 35Mbps of real udp bandwidth at their 5GHz links.
• The IP provisioning system, as well as the network works in a kind of multi-layer approach, mixing automatic and delegated: For instance, instead of the all-automatic IP provisioning we have at guifi.net, first of all WiND allocates a class C subnetwork to who is willing to create a node, once the new subnetwork is validated, a network administrator confirms that network range. After this, the owner of this network is responsible for its administration. When a newcomer appears, is being asked for doing “surveys” to the air, and depending in what he sees, is assigned to the best Access Point, and by going to the WiND is able to contact with the owner and then gets from him the final allocation from him.
• While routing the network, instead of a global dynamic routing, the users can manage in their own network segments, often with OSPF, but also some experiences with OLSR. Over the air, the networks are announced using BGP.
• The WiND feeds automatically the master DNS .awn domain.
• The network content is easily browsed by the internal “wahoo.awmn” and “woogle.awmn” search engines. Very cool. Somebody said that Catalans are used to be cheap? No way. I've got the impression that in Athens have a very efficient supply chain oriented to keep very low costs, and also enjoy an impressive manufacturing community which able to build sophisticated antennas and RF enabled devices with commodity hardware widely available.
• While using available hardware and firmware, they still have energy to work developing truly open firmwares, I mean, workaround current limitations on madwifi drivers. Let's keep an eye on this: Sooner or later that will become a real success.
• They are an open and non-profit organization based on volunteers contributions, some of them are freely tied around an association for funding the network. The “omni” antennas are not the preferred choice, they bring some noise into the air while sector are much more efficient... this should sound familiar to many guifi.net folks right?

AWMN writes down in Greek, we do in Catalan, but we all speak in free networks language.

The essence of all of this is at the PlugMeIn guide compiled by Nikitas. Don't think that's just simple “connect in 3 steps guide for newbies”, it's much more: a detailed and complete document with all the essence of AWN.net knowledge, a real "Best Practices" guide for free networkers, that needs an urgent translation into English.

All the credits goes to Nikitas, alessondro, cirrus, ngia and as well as all the other friendly people who hosted me in the Amerikis Club but I can't remember their names (Greek names are something really cryptic for me), they kindly gave me some of their time although they where quite busy organizing the Expo Athens this weekend.