Hello, good morning. We are here, in Perafita.
It is a village in the county of Lluçanès, [in Catalonia,]
and we came to present what we did
almost ten years ago in the library as a
starting point for Guifi.net in the area.
Up on the roof we can see the antennas,
obviously, the ones we installed back then
have been updated;
and now we will go to see the library
and explain how all this happened.
- Hi, Jordi! How are you?
- Hi! How are you doing?
- We came to see how this Guifi thing works,
to explain a bit about what this is all about.
- Oh, then, come on!
- Is the library still open
three times per week?
- Yes, we open it three days a week, now
it is closed because we open it in the afternoons,
but we will open it just a moment to see it.
- Then, let's go. Thank you very much.
Marc!
- (Isn't he down there?)
- Marc?
- This is Marc, right?
He is one of the starters here.
(And... come in).
-CULTURE CENTRE-
This is the library of Perafita,
a rural library,
where both books and
access to new technologies
are combined.
The computers, there are quite some people
that use them. Actually, they have
also had computer computer courses here.
Weekly, where have the Story Time,
when young children come, while
the rest of days we are open for general access.
Here is Marc, who was
the first person I heard
talking about Guifi.net, despite
he won't admit it, will you?
And he is the one who made the whole
network installation, right?
- Actually, we were quite a few doing it.
- And all this started
in late 2006? In 2006?
- Yes...
- I remember we attended
a presentation by Ramon Roca and Gil [Forcada],
they did it in Sant Bartomeu [del Grau],
and, in fact, Perafita was one of the only [villages]
not already connected, wasn't it?
- True. We came back from Sant Bartomeu, where they
already had the Telecentre and so on,
and that was how we got in touch
with the Guifi project.
- Here the supernode is over the library roof,
a place that already had a DSL link,
which was public, ...
- And it is still there, isn't it?
- ... belonging to the Town Council.
- We laid the cables and the whole stuff,
then put the antennas up on the roof...
- Here, there is a link with Santa Eulàlia
de Puig-oriol; we linked Sant Bartomeu,
from the tower, and Santa Eulàlia. Then,
from Santa Eulàlia, we had a link to here.
Then, they linked with Olost.
- With Olost...
- Therefore, we had two different links and,
in case one of them failed,
we could still use the other one.
- All this happened because of a resource,
the Internet connection, that was already here.
As Jordi explained, this resource is used
on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,
in the afternoon, so what we achieved was
opening the library, 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, to everyone.
Back in those days, practically the only place
where there was a bit of Internet was here,
in the center of town and counting.
And it was very limited.
- The neighbours of Santa Eulàlia also used
the connection we had here, also people from
when they not yet had theirs... Well,
that meant having broadband access in places
where there was none, and it was super good.
- And here, in the local server, I remember
what we deployed, as he we had
very little bandwidth, right?
We were hosting a Debian mirror,
we had a copy of the Wikipedia...
- There was a local file server...
- Yes, we had several things here
that provided local content...
Very nice! This is the story of how
Guifi.net arrived to Perafita, and how
Perafita also dynamized the project;
even if we joined a little late,
we ended up being in the middle of it.
Thank you very much for opening this for us,
in the end you have learnt a little bit about
how all this started. And also thank you for your
attention. It was a pleasure to share this
experience with you and to help
making it also yours. Thank you very much.