 Welcome to foreign language language class. So Freifunk is a German compound word and Frei means free and funk does not need funk. It means radio as in radio signal or radio transmission. So to put in more complicated words what we do is free and open wireless community networks. And before I get to the socially more acceptable stuff I'm gonna tell a little bit about like what's slightly special about the technology that we use. So what we do is mesh networking. Just imagine you have a couple of Wi-Fi routers like regular home devices distributed throughout your city that are symbolized by yellow anchors in this figure. Don't ask why yellow anchors it's a hammock thing. And the radio range is symbolized by a McGinty circle. So you would have maybe one router in one part of the town and two routers in another part of the town. And at the bottom of the screen you got three routers and the two can obviously talk to each other because they're in radio range of each other. But the three at the bottom are not. But still the left one can talk to the right one using the middle node. So and then you would find your end devices like smartphones, laptops, Raspberry Pi's whatever you hook up to it connected to your five from routers. Now every device in each of these clouds can talk to every other device within that same cloud. But what we want to do is build a citywide network. So we want it all to be connected into one and you cannot do that right now. So what we do is or what you could do is you could do a long distance radio links and we do that but it's a lot of work. EZR is for most people to hook up at least some of the routers to the internet. So we added gateway service and data centers and they would accept VPN tunnels and those five from routers could now make a tunnel connected to the gateway. And now we have one citywide network. Now every device within that network within the entire city connected to five phone can talk to it every other device. Due to some legal specialty in that we have in Germany and I don't want to get into the details because it probably doesn't apply to most other countries. We route all internet directed traffic through the gateway servers. So for example, you have your phone at the bottom of the screen and you got a service running at the top of the screen. Now the phone wants to talk to the service, wants to access it and the router which hosts the phone could send the traffic through various ways in this figure apparently. So it could take the direct route A through the VPN tunnel to the gateway onto the service but there's other ways as well. It could decide to do two wireless hops and then pass it on route B to another gateway server and then you see there's even more ways afterwards. So for those of you familiar with routing of course it's not uncommon to have more than one possibility but just imagine it looks slightly complicated here with just six routers. Just imagine you have a city with a thousand routers. This would be very complicated. And then participation in Freifunk is 100% voluntarily. So people turn off and on their routers all the time. So your network topology changes constantly and we use mostly Wi-Fi links and they're unreliable. So you don't want to just use any connection. You want to use the best connection and this is really where the mesh protocols come in. So to do this manually in a routing table which you probably could you would constantly have to update it second by second by second is just not reasonable. And this is what a mesh protocol does for you. So as you can tell mesh protocols are complex. They have to deal with that constantly changing topology. They have to deal with unreliable radio wings. You know there's people walking by antennas. People are bags of water essentially absorbing or reflecting microwaves. There's leaves in the trees. There's humidity like rain, fog or whatever. And so your radio links constantly change. All the quality does. And then you probably want to avoid certain things like routing loops. You don't want your packets to run in circles if there are any. You don't want your data to get lost. So mesh protocol has to handle that. And our goal at least is to make it widely affordable. So it has to perform on cheap home routers. And maybe you want to have special services like roaming. So you make a zip call with your mobile phone and you walk through the street from one Frivengrouter to the next and you don't want your connection to drop. So there's not one mesh protocol. There's many probably more than I listed here. So there's a better approach to mobile networking, Batman Advance, Babel, BMX, optimized link stage routing versions one and two. And you might be asking so which one is the best? And the answer is there is no answer to that. Actually a lot of research and a lot of brain cells went into development of these mesh protocols over the past 20 years. And that's not the one mesh protocol which does it all perfectly. And that's why actually why people meet once a year in some city in Europe and let their mesh protocols compete. So if you want to check out pros and cons of each mesh protocol, you could probably check betelmesh.org and see how they perform. What I can tell you is that at Freifunk we mostly use OSR and Batman Advance currently. But that may very well change in the future. So when I do a talk about Freifunk, I usually start out differently because like the regular people, not so tech savvy, they think the internet is their favorite homepage or, I don't know, the search engine or whatever. They don't have a clear picture in the head of what the internet is and how it works. So it's very hard for them to read their minds around the idea of what Freifunk is. I know I don't need to explain the internet in this audience. However, I'd like to point out some design goals. So obviously the internet is a coupling of multiple networks, hopefully redundant, was supposed to be distributed, no single entity controlling it, was supposed to be open and was supposed to be neutral. So the infrastructure is separate from the data which is transported and everything is treated equally. We all know what the state of the internet is, but I think those design goals are still valid. So what we do at Freifunk is open, free, free of charge, neutral and decentralized networks, plural actually, because it's not one network, it's many. Open to us means it's open for anybody to participate. I can take Hamburg as an example because I'm from there, so when you walk through the city, you would see a network SSID, Hamburg.freifunk.net and it's unsecured, so you can just click on it, you connect it, that's it. We don't want your name, we don't want your phone number, your credit card number, password, any kind of credentials, just use it and have fun, enjoy. More interestingly to you might be it's just as easy to participate on the providing side, so you can provide access by setting up a node or many nodes and you can run services within that network. I'll get into services later. So free is as in freedom, so we use mostly free software. We do it free of charge, so nobody earns any money with it. It's obviously then non-commercial and it's actually very good because we don't have that conflict of interest you might have with your commercial telecom on one side and its customers on the other side. Their interests might not always be the same. At Freifunk, hopefully all the decisions that we make are in the best interest of the users because the people operating the network are the people using the network and vice versa, so it's really a network for the people, by the people, anybody can participate on the administrative side as or just as like they can use it. Famous example of that where you have a conflict of interest with commercial telecoms is net neutrality, so of course it's good for every user. Some telecoms want to charge twice and so they are not net neutral. And as I said, it's decentralized network, so it's decentralized in a way. If you remember that picture of the mesh nodes, they are all operated by different people, so it's not one entity controlling it. It's very many people and there's not one Freifunk mesh network, there's very many. So actually we got currently more than 310 communities, mostly throughout Germany, some in Austria. I hope this can change after this talk. And if you want to check out that map live, you can do so at community.freifunk.net. Don't worry that it's HTTP, it's just a little forward to you to an encrypted side, it's just shorter. And it will list like all the attributes of those communities, like which mesh protocols they use, what their homepage is and so on. Once again, since I'm from Hamburg, I take Hamburg as an example. So you would see all those little dots over the map of Hamburg and all those Freifunk nodes. So currently we have more than 1000 nodes active and they are randomly distributed throughout the city because there is no plan behind. They are set up by random people in random places. So they operated basically anywhere in homes and rooftops, church towers and community centers, hex spaces of course, in cafes and venues anywhere. And two or three years ago, we started also to provide access to refugee camps. And I think that's very important to them, much more important than a lot of people think at first thought, you know, because they have friends and families get it throughout the entire world that they want to stay in touch with. They want to know what's going on in the home country that they came from. And they want to know how this country works that they live in now, which is so foreign to them. So in a lot of ways, or translation tools on the internet are very useful for them. So in a lot of ways, access and free access to the internet is much more important to them than it is to us. Can check out this map live. I'm going to explain a little bit to you what it does. So yeah, all these blue, red and green dots are five notes somewhere. And we'd see maybe like these long green lines, the color is the link quality. So you have bad links here, you got good links here. And these actually are long distance radio links. So this one's almost two kilometers long. It's got a transmission quality of 98%. And then since this mesh protocol does everything automatically, for example, these two, they are not it's not like they're antennas pointed at each other, they're just in range of each other. And they see each other, and they make a connection here, which is not very good in this case, but it works. It's also good, for example, to have as a backup. If the internet drops out, they can use the internet connection of the other one and vice versa. Okay, so you can take a look at the map in parallel at map, I'm open net and play with it. So you don't get support for me talking. I talked about a lot about nodes or access points or routers. What we use, we call them nodes, five nodes are basically mostly off the shelf routers. So you would have your regular omnidirectional antenna router, or sometimes we use section antennas, or these dishes that you see at the top for long distance radio links. And quite a lot of devices are supported. And what you would do is the unpack your router, go to the configuration interface and exchange the firmware, which is already on there by the vendor, with the Freifunk firmware. It's currently based on open WT might be lead in the future. We'll see. But the firmware details, like which mesh protocol they use, what services are pre installed on a router and running, that actually varies by community. So every community can do what they think is best for them. talked about services. Obviously, the most renowned and ask for service is internet access. But that's not so you can actually run services within that network that never have to go through the internet. They can but they don't have to. So what I've seen running on Freifunk networks is blocks encrypted video chat file sharing with FTP or C file that's kind of like Dropbox or whatever it's open source implementation. Get servers, new social instances, kind of like Twitter, also open source, sip telephony, mumble, radio streaming, podcasting, people run new servers or webcams or whatever, you know, and some people really do cool art installations with that always give like one example, because I think it's very funny. So somebody connected Raspberry Pi to his router and made it possible for anybody to upload videos to that Raspberry Pi, and the videos would be projected across the street from his house on the wall. So can think of anything that could go wrong with it. So Freifunk basically is what you make it. You know, if you have any idea, just do it. It's a network for you to play with. And I think that's kind of like really the hacker spirit behind it, you get something some infrastructure, somebody else built and you can build on it, you can participate in you can play with it, whatever. And that what makes it so much fun really. So people ask us a lot. So who are you? Who are these Freifunkers? Why do you do it for free? Are you crazy? And Freifunk is not one person or one set of persons is actually very many different factions that all think this is a good thing. So a lot of clubs support us, for example, especially like, if we want to sign a contract to get on a roof or whatever, then we need a legal person. So clubs like the CCC and others sign contracts for us. There's data senders giving us traffic, rec space, electricity, internet exchanges led us here. So we are AS4909 in Hamburg. And we would love to be here with you if you're within the same internet exchange, let us know. Sometimes municipalities or some cities say, hey, you can use our buildings or give us money or both or whatever. And basically, it's it's the average person of the street. So it's you and me and everybody and anyone can participate and it's all done by volunteers. Once again, nobody makes any money with it. And it's supposed to stay that way. That also means any type of skill is welcome. You know, you don't have to be a techie to participate. You can just, you know, if you want to do graphics or whatever, just do it. We're done security. So I said it's it's an open Wi-Fi, there's no password, which also means it's unencrypted. Apparently, you can also do encrypted open networks like they do here at camp. But we would have to type in some random credentials, at least, which would scare off most people. And we think this is the easiest way to do. Sometimes people say, Oh, how can you do that? It's unencrypted. People could sniff the traffic in the air, which is true. So they could sniff the traffic traffic between the end device and the access point, the range of Wi-Fi is obviously very limited. But the chances are there. On the other end, the chances people sniffing your traffic on the internet, if it's internet direct to traffic is 100%. If you want to be sarcastic about it, it's actually more than 100% because we know there's more than one party sniffing all of everybody's traffic. So the only thing keeping you safe is really enter encryption. That's what we tell people use enter encryption. You'll only save if the data is encrypted between you and the device you're communicating with. And then you don't have to trust us, me, anybody, it should matter which infrastructure you're running on can just use it. Another question that people ask us. So if I connect my free from grotto to my home network to give it internet access so it can set up a VPN tunnel, do I compromise my home network? And the answer is no, they are separated. This is a topic which is very dear to me, a long haul radio links, because I think it's just awesome fun. You get to see nice climb roofs and see beautiful panoramas of the city live in. But as you can tell from the pictures at the bottom, it's a lot more work than just a flesh or other connected to power. And that's it. So sometimes, first of all, you have to get onto the roof, which is more difficult than you would think takes us maybe nine months to negotiate with some building orders. And then maybe there's no electricity on a roof. So you have to set up the electricity, you have to if you're on top of the roof, you have to worry about lightning strike. So you have to really make a proper installation. And if you did all that, you probably want to put more than what one router on there. So you want to put a set of routers pointing in every direction and have more than one link. And you need to do a lot of manual click configuration. So it's a lot of work, but it's definitely worth it. Why do we do that gives you redundancy, the more connected the network is, the more direct links are between the nodes. The more redundancy you have, obviously, if some link drops out or your internet connection drops out, you can still use your radio link and so on. If your mesh protocol is smart. It will also give you a lot distribution. So it will sense some path is congested and take another route. And it gives you independence of the internet and only put like half jokingly here, democracy insurance. Unfortunately, we've seen over the last couple of years, what people do with the internet. So there's no fear traffic, they censor the internet, they turn it off altogether. And this would be a network which is decentral and still works when the internet is turned off. So it's still have a way to communicate. I don't want to let you off on a sad note. So I really want to tell you that it's a lot of fun. And you get to play with hardware that maybe you have at home, but most people don't. You get to go to places that you probably wouldn't go if you look very closely, there's somebody hanging with a drill in his hand off the top of that building installing antennas. And you get to install Wi Fi in the most random places and make people really happy. And my message would be copy what we do, build on it, feed it back to the community, set up your free from community today. Thanks. Time for questions. Right. Cool. Thank you very much, Andre. Yeah, we've got time for a few questions. If only it's got one. I've got one to begin with. So if we want to, if I want to create a thrive on the node in my home, what would I need to do practically speaking? Yeah, starting out is a little bit difficult because you have to set up the entire different infrastructure. So what you would have to do for, for example, you would have to make a decision for which firmware you use. Obviously, you could build your own firmware based on open WT or open or any other open firmware. But that would be very difficult, or you could choose one which is already out there and configure it for your purposes. This is the router side. And then on the backhand side, you would have to send a set up some central infrastructure, at least if you do it the way we do, because some services are unfortunately, still centralized, because we cannot do it any other way. So for example, IPv6, you know, network works without any central components, but for IPv4, we need DHCP running on DHCP servers. So you would have to set up that. Or if you want to use gateways, because in your country, you have to route the traffic through gateways, then you would have to set up those. So starting out is not that easy, but lots of people have done it. So there's more than 300 communities. And I think lots more people could do it. So to start, if you've got a public IP address at home, you can't just flash a router and plug it in. It's a bit more than that. You could. But it would be by itself, you know, it won't be connected to any of it. Yeah, you can add more nodes. And if they're in radio range of each other that it would automatically connect, you could talk within that little network then, and let it grow from there. Cool. And how long has it taken to get from the beginning of Freifunk in Germany to the 300,000 nodes you have now? 34,000, sorry. Okay, not quite as much. So I think Freifunk started out sometime in 2003, I wasn't participating back then. And then it grew rapidly. And then the last change in Germany, and which is almost killed it, until people found other ways to compensate with that. So too difficult to explain. But people have found other arrangements, how they can deal with that. And then it grew back again. So and in the last two or three years, it grew rapidly to the size that we have now. Cool. We got any other questions from anyone here? Oh, yeah, I'll take it around. I'll be upright. Hi. Is it completely legally? Yes. You don't need any licenses to put your... Yeah, we use Wi-Fi, which is publicly accessible. Anybody can use it. Once again, certain frequencies in a five gigahertz band, for example, are limited in use. In Germany, you would go to the Bundesnetzagent 2 and say, hey, I want to use those frequencies, can I? And they might allow you or not. I don't know how it is in England, for example. But actually, most frequencies you can just use, yeah. And do you know if the free net of Fryfunk net in the Netherlands? I don't know of anything. Maybe there's something which is similar. There's, for example, I don't know about the Netherlands, but in Spain, there's Guifi, which is also a community operated network. They also do fiber optic cables and lots of other stuff. Athens has a big network, which is slightly similar to ours. So there are similar communities in other countries, yeah. And there are plans to connect them, the countries and... Not really. We could. It's possible. Because if we are at the same internet exchange point, or through something which we call Intercity VPN, which is also a VPN connecting not routers to gateway servers, but networks to each other. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Welcome. We had another question back somewhere. So do you have to ask for permission when you want to install something on top of a building? You have to... Depends. When you live there, you can just do it, I guess. If you want to get on the rooftop, you might have to ask your landlord. Depends on who owns the building. If it's a city building, so you might want to go to the city and ask him if you could use it. Okay. Thanks. So you don't currently have any locations outside of Germany? No locations that call themselves Freifunk. As I said, there are other similar networks, but they might be called differently. And I don't know them all. And how do you pose internet access working for those locations if they're trying to get out on that network, if they're in a different country? Okay. You mean if somebody would set up Freifunk in a different country, like as their own network or... Yeah. So somebody creates their own network over in the UK and they're trying to... Somebody connects their network and they're trying to connect to the internet. Right. They would basically have to set up the same infrastructure that we did. It's basically the question that the host asked in the beginning, what I would have to do to start a network like this. So I would have to create firmware for my routers and I would have to do some backbone infrastructure on the other hand. And you would have to set that up. Obviously, you could just take a router from some other city and connect it through a VPN tunnel. But that's not what we want to do. We don't want to just be a VPN offloader. We want to build a city-nigh-wide radio network. Hopefully, that answers the question. Did you mention that Austria was connected? Yes. They call it Funkfire, but it's very similar. All right. So effectively, they have their own AS number, do they? Effectively? Yeah. So if a Freifunk network was to be done in the UK, you'd probably suggest having its own AS number as well. Absolutely. And we are not one AS in Germany either. So there's many ASs for each community if they have that. But you'd have recipes and firmware that people could customize, for example? Exactly. So everything is open source. You can find it on GitHub and we would love for people to use what we built. So with the connectivity from your current Freifunk nodes, where they hop onto the internet is that generally an exchange point for each city that they each node would have a radio link to, as opposed to everyone's home, current internet connection? It's both. So it depends how you router connects to that gateway server could either be through a VPN tunnel or direct radio link. Okay. Do we have any other questions? No. Oh, yeah, we do. In terms of IP addressing, if I would set up a web server, would it just use its existing public address, or do you use like an internal range for their internal services? Did you want to you want to make it accessible as an internal service? Yeah, we'll say Freifunk. So for IPv4, it depends on the community. And so I can only speak for Hamburg, how we do it for IPv4. We have local RFC 1918 addresses. And so you could not connect to the internet with IPv4, but we have public IPv6 space. So your service would be accessible from the Freifunk network and also in the public internet. Super. Okay. I think that's it for a question. So, Andre, thank you very much indeed for telling us all about Freifunk. Thanks for having me.