Use Unlicensed WiFi Spectrum in Rural Areas/Small Towns

When it rains on agricultural land, it does a lot of good, but if it rains in an uninhabited area, it often goes waste. Somewhat similar is the story of the electromagnetic spectrum. In rural areas and in small towns, the demand for wireless services is a small fraction of what it is elsewhere. So it goes mostly unused. It is unfair to charge a school student in such an area a hundred rupees a month for access to the Internet. No government can subsidize that kind of expenditure. The typical rural student lives on dal and roti worth less than Rs 200 a month. An interesting solution to the problem of providing inexpensive Internet access in rural areas has been demonstrated in a neighboring country – Nepal. 

Dr Mahabir Pun
is a social entrepreneur working in some rural areas of Nepal. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. His focus is not so much the technology, but on social good; technology is a tool for him. He started using the unlicensed WiFi spectrum a few years ago to connect villages to the Internet and to provide village populations access via WiFi. (Here “unlicensed spectrum” is used in the sense of “spectrum that can be used without a license).  You can find more about him at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mahabir-Pun/43662749774 and at
http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/mahabir-pun 

Visiting students from abroad used to take simple equipment to him to help him build his network. Now, such WiFi equipment is available easily and inexpensively. It costs you less than two thousand US dollars to connect up a village to the Internet. The backbone of his network runs on 5.8 GHz band and local distribution is on the 2.4 GHz band. If you choose a building that is on a relatively high level over the land around, or if you use a tall communication tower, you can cover quite a distance with this technology. Mahabir puts his equipment on hillocks and gets hops up to 50 KMs using directional antennas. For more information on the technology Mahabir uses, please visit http://nepalwireless.net/

Several groups in South Africa have also built WiFi based networks covering rural areas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_wireless_community_networks

Bhaskaran Raman and Kameswari Chebrolu at IIT Kanpur had done work using this technology and reported it in 2007. Visit http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/braman/papers/2007-exp-dgp.pdf

Imagine what we can do in India with this technology. There is equipment that connects to the backbone at 5.8 GHz at one end and acts as a 2.4 GHz access point at the other. Some information on such equipment can be found at http://0086cctv.en.alibaba.com/product/718115013-210005803/5_8GHz_2_4GHz_wireless_backbone_transmission_and_wifi_coverage_equipment.html

All we need is for someone to operate a backbone router and a bunch of 5.8 GHz units in every Panchayat Union town. The technology works using mesh network techniques. If a village does not have line of sight to its Panchayat Union, it can link up via another village that does have such a link.

Someone should be paying for Internet access, which costs about 100,000 Rupees per year for a full one megabit per second. Schools can use standard equipment involving a directional antenna and connect up with the back-end and provide 2.4 GHz WiFi access at its user end. Anyone near the village unit would be able to access the Internet with a tablet or smartphone or even a laptop or PC. Mahabir Pun says that he keeps his network running by charging a subscription of Rs 1 per month! There are probably many well-wishers of Mahabir who donate to his cause and thereby provide a subsidy. His project covering 175 villages seems to have been set up with a grant of less than half a million US dollars. His network provides not only simple connectivity, but also runs web servers, proxy servers, etc. Applications involved include tourism to bring employment in rural areas.

Imagine that some unit of the Govt of India takes on itself the job of providing 5.8 MHz access facility and pays for the Internet bandwidth. They could restrict user access to the ac.in and gov.in domains to make misuse difficult, and provide access only to information and services related to education and govt services. Imagine that a professional society like the Computer Society of India says “Many of our members will volunteer to go back to their schools to help them raise money to buy the school-end equipment and set it up”. I have no authority to speak on behalf of any organization, but there is no law against giving suggestions - is there?

What about our engineering colleges? Can some of their students volunteer to spend a few days every month visiting the schools they studied at, and help them acquire Internet connections? These colleges usually have very impressive looking buildings that can be seen from miles around. Can they give a little room on their terrace for hosting the school network’s antennas? Most importantly, can the students offer a few lectures/demos per month and train a few enthusiastic teachers at each school? 

I think a project like this would release a lot of energies. Over 70% of the school students live in small towns and metros. A lot of learning in future would occur online with people surfing the Internet and using services such as online courses. The infrastructure I visualize here is not merely for school students. Every public library should offer WiFi access free to those inside it and on the street outside it! Perhaps every panchayat office should offer one. The equipment can run round the clock unmanned. They can be given backup power from a UPS with large enough batteries to last out common power cuts. They can even be solar powered. This is all possible because the equipment does not demand huge amounts of power. I would like to see users walk up to a nearby school or panchayat office with a tablet or smart phone, sit under a tree nearby, and use their Internet access devices.

Let me come back to one important question. Why volunteers? As you know, you can only help those who help themselves. I have visited far too many schools which have bought fine equipment with Govt grants: server, LAN, terminal rooms, 40 PCs and so on. They are usually impeccably clean, because no one uses them! Many schools will tell you that they got a grant for a purchase, but that after a year there was no money to pay for maintenance of the machines. It is very difficult to retain trained staff. Young people who learn to work with computers go away to bigger cities in search of better paying jobs. There is often nobody in a rural school to worry about anti-virus protection or software updates. If there is any Internet connection available, the viruses eat up quite a bit of the bandwidth! Besides, the schools have much bigger problems to face, like the students wanting to study in English medium but not knowing enough English to understand what the books contain! The problem is not with the machines. It is the absence of people with knowledge, enthusiasm and the desire to make a change. It is the lack of organizations to motivate, train and support volunteers. Government hiring an army of computer technicians cannot solve these problems. Volunteers can, but social entrepreneurs are the key. It is fire in their bellies that will make our citizens learn and earn enough to eat well!

Acknowledgement: I thank my former colleague Mr. M. K. Durai Murugan, Manager (Technical) at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, for his comments and suggestions.

Srinivasan Ramani