Community networks are an emerging and successful model for the Future Internet across Europe and far beyond. The CONFINE project complements existing FIRE infrastructure by establishing a new facility built on the federation of existing community IP networks constituted by more than 20,000 nodes and 20,000 Km of links.

These community networks incorporate a large and wide variety of commodity wireless and optical links, heterogeneous nodes, different routing protocols, applications and a large number of end-users, following an innovative model of self-provisioning using unlicensed and public spectrum.The project develops a unified access to an open tesbed with tools that allow researchers to deploy, run, monitor and experiment with services, protocols and applications on real-word community IP networks. This integrated platform will provide user-friendly access to these emerging networks supporting any stakeholder interested in developing and testing experimental technologies for open and interoperable network infrastructures, strengthening open community networks. This type of networks is an emerging and successful model for the Future Internet across Europe and beyond. The project includes as partners well established community networks with large end-user bases and diverse application providers (e.g. content distribution, voice, data and multimedia communication), research institutions with experience in key related areas, non profit organizations and SMEs with experience in supporting researchers, community networks and end-users.

Project duration: 01.01.2013 - 31.12.2013