Hey, can UNICEF help us narrow the digital divide in NYC?
;-)
On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 02:38, Nimesh D. Parikh wrote:
Yes the power of wireless is truly amazing and how an important role it has started to play. We have several ongoing projects where entire countries are beginning to leverage the 802.11b to bring the communication for the masses. Some of these projects even have UNICEF funding. Just goes to show the scale and magnitude of installations.
By the way I forgot to mention that we are actively seeking to sponsor these types of projects. Please feel free to get in touch with us for more info.
Nimesh D. Parikh
smartBridges
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of The Wirefree Network
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2003 1:34 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [smartBridges] Bridging the Digital Divide
Quite an amazing story. Wish I could have helped out on this one. Would have been quite the adventure!
The power of WIRELESS!!!
Sully
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nimesh D. Parikh
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 8:38 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [smartBridges] Bridging the Digital Divide
I thought this may be an interesting story to share with the group here. The impact is quite large. sB had sponsored a group of volunteers and they have done an outstanding job. A more polished version of the story will be coming out soon but here is the report they filed from the field.
Nimesh Parikh
smartBridges
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Bridging the Digital Divide:
A smartBridges success story in rural Nepal
A handful of Nepali villagers and foreign friends had a vision. One year later, the vision has become a reality.
A ragtag team, without much technical experience and without much money, has been able to create a wireless communications network that connections five villages and the outside world using wireless data radios. Two UCLA students, Mark Michalski and Robin Shields, and one Boston-based carpenter, Sage Radachowsky, helped their Nepali counterparts to locate the equipment and to implement the network.
Nanda Thapa(*) uses the internet for many things. He communicates with people around the world to find funding for his village's school. He also responds to incoming emails from a website that he created to get volunteers to come to his village.
Nanda used to have to walk for 8 hours and then take a 6 hour bus ride to check his email. He used to have to walk for two days to have a meeting with a neighboring village about a joint project. Now he can do both in seconds, thanks to a new wireless network in rural Nepal. He used to check his email once a month. Now he checks it daily.
Now, instead of walking for one or two days to deliver a simple message or to meet with people in neighboring villages, villagers are able to communicate via voice and text meeting software. Villagers and volunteers in the villages are able to communicate with people anywhere in the world by sending email, a facility that was previously available only by walking one to three days and then taking a 4 hour bus ride to Pokhara. People are also able to access the wealth of information on the internet regarding any subject, from learning about mushroom culture to getting drivers for a printer.
These capabilities have already made a big difference in the lives of the people living in the villages. The ability to communicate easily has already worked as a catalyst for future locally-generated development projects.
However, the future of the network remains uncertain. In the context of a guerrilla war, the people having the ability to communicate may be seen as a threat by both the government and the Maoists. Each side may possibly believe that the other side will use the ability to communicate against them. For this reason, the network must unfortunately remain something of a secret within Nepal at the moment. In a time of peace, the wireless network could be shown off as a model of local development, to be replicated elsewhere for relatively little money.
Despite the war, the team that implemented the project would like to draw upon their experience in creating this network and replicate the network in other places in Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayas.
Technical Aspects of the Project
Please refer to the attached Network Topology graph. The wireless network currently employs 12 smartBridges AirPointPro Outdoor radios, and may soon employ two more to reach additional villages. The longest link is between the main relay station and a city, where a server is located to connect to a dialup ISP. This link spans about 34 km horizontally, and about 3,000 meters vertically. The main relay station is on a mountaintop at an altitude of about 3,400 meters.
The extreme sensitivity of the smartBridges APPO unit is one key to bridging this great distance without using a signal amplifier. Using quality 24 dBi grid dish antennas from Pacific Wireless, and connecting the dipole directly to the radios with a 0.5 meter pigtail to minimize cable loss, is another key.
All radios are protected from nearby lightning discharges by lighting arrestors which are grounded to the earth.
There is a secondary relay station on another ridge at an even higher altitude. (Part of the Annapurna mountain, one of the ten tallest mountains in the world. See attached photograph). From these two relay stations, the five target villages have direct lines of sight of up to 5 km from the relay stations, and are easily spanned using the smartBridges APPOs on less-than-maximum power settings. The Dial-A-Power feature of smartBridges radios has proven to be very useful, for it saves power at the off-grid stations.
The relay stations are each powered by 70 watt solar panels connected to deep cycle batteries by a charge controller. Each relay station also has a wind generator, but so far this has proven to be unnecessary. There has been little wind, and the solar power has proven to be sufficient for the radios.
Currently, villagers talk and chat with each other using Microsoft Netmeeting. However, one member of the team is working to develop custom VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software, using the OpenH323 VoIP standard, which will use a Quicknet Internet LineJack at the server base station to allow voice telephone calls to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). This is very important in a country such as Nepal, where the majority of people even in cities do not have an email address.
[If you would like more information about this project, or if you would like to contribute to a future project, please email Sage Radachowsky at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(*) The names of all Nepali persons and all place names have been changed for security purposes, due to the current civil war in Nepal.
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