ICTworks by Inveneo

Much has been written about India’s unveiling of the $35 tablet Aakash. There is debate about Aakash’s potential to change the educational paradigm, about its quality and specifications being up to commercial standards, about its "Made in India" tag and about its claim as the world’s cheapest tablet.

To continue this debate in a slightly different direction, I am Mustafa Naseem and I argue that Aakash has the potential to change the current scenario of limited access to computing for the majority of the world’s population outside of these discussions.

The need for context appropriate computing technologies:

When Martin Cooper placed the world’s first call from a portable cellular phone in 1973, he likely never imagined cell phones to become universally pervasive in less than 40 years. Why did the cell phone become so popular in the developing world? Take a look at Nokia 1100, the world’s best selling phone handset: it was low cost, easy to use, had a long battery life and only required a SIM card to connect its owner to the rest of the world.

To its credit, it also had a number of other features including a dust-proof rubber keypad, a flashlight accessible by a single touch and a near child-proof robust design. If we consider the primary four features listed above, the Nokia 1100 sets the standard for technology for the developing world −cost, connectivity, usability and a decent battery.

Aakash as appropriate technology:

The Aakash more or less meets these criteria. With its $60 retail price tag ($50 for the Government of India), it has come remarkably close to the $30 price point that led to widespread adoption of cell phones like the Nokia 1100. It use of a touch screen and the Android Operating System make it relatively easy to use after the initial learning curve that we all go through with new technologies.

The Akaash is equipped with a 2100 mAh battery, 2 watts of power consumption and has a solar charging option for users who are simply off the grid. The tablets are equipped with a GPRS module that supplements WiFi compatibility, which will help users connect through the maze of cellular networks. Apart from these features, the Aakash comes with 2 USB ports, a 3.5 mm audio input/output jack, and support for all popular text, audio and video formats.

Aakash has its shortfalls: a resistive touch screen, no access to the Android Market for apps, and a poor battery life to name a few. But at the given price point, I believe it is a decent piece of appropriate technology.

Market forces need to meet this demand:

In his speech at the 2011 Social Good Summit, Nicholas Negroponte said that he’d stop making low cost laptops if marketforces filled this gap. In the case of cell phones, manufacturers and providers supported the wide-scale adoption of cheap but useful phones to fill this gap.

Aakash gets us one step closer to the truly affordable and useful laptop than “specialty” educational machines (like the Simputer and XO) or full-powered Netbooks whose price hovers around $199 in most retail stores. India’s gigantic companies like Reliance are following this trend, and are manufacturing tablets like the Reliance 3G tablet in the $250-300 range. However, with Aakash’s release, things are bound to change – it’s a potentially powerful pricing function.

Government is seeding the change

By encouraging Data Wind to manufacture the Aakash for the educational market, the Government of India has encouraged competition at the lower end of the market, thereby unknowingly regulating the market for low cost computing devices. In an interview with NDTV, the CEO of Data Wind talked about an Aakash 2.0, which could have a capacitive touch screen, a 3G modem, a faster processor and an increased battery life at a similar price point.

We will now have to see if big giants like Reliance respond and how the quest continues for the truly commercially competitive, low cost computing device.

WirelessU is a group of dedicated professionals working towards a world-wide, people-centered, inclusive Information Society. Their goal is to make it easier for existing groups to offer wireless training sessions by providing free access to high quality training materials. WirelessU has:

1. An open access repository of educational materials: All available for any person to download
2. A tool for educators to distribute training materials to students - just upload & share the link. All revisions and translations are tracked, making it easy to find, share, and collaborate.
3. A community! WirelessU connects people. Whether you are interested in learning about wireless technology, teaching a wireless training session, or holding a training event at a local venue, WirelessU will help you connect to the people who make all of this possible.

Wireless Networking in the Developing World

Advances in wireless technology make it very attractive for extending the Internet - either across the street or to the next town. Wi-Fi is fast, can go long distances, and is very affordable. Best of all, anyone can learn to use wireless to extend existing Internet into other areas. The signal starts with you!

And you can start with Wireless Networking in the Developing World, a free book about designing, implementing, and maintaining low-cost wireless networks.

This book was created by a team of individuals who each, in their own field, are actively participating in the ever-expanding Internet by pushing its reach farther than ever before. The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to sharply increase.

By taking advantage of this state of affairs, people can finally begin to have a stake in building their own communications infrastructure. The book should not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how it can be done, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community

Mark Summer, Inveneo's Chief Innovation Officer, also leads our effort to bring needed information and communication technologies to Haiti. As part of Inveneo's contribution to the Clinton Global Initiative 2010 Annual Meeting, he wrote an article on our activities in Haiti for the Innovations Journal, a quarterly publication from MIT Press about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.

An excerpt from The Value of Information and
Communication Technologies in Humanitarian Relief Efforts:

For many disaster response veterans, the Haiti earthquake represents a turning point in our collective thinking about the value of ICTs in humanitarian relief efforts. A range of ICT-focused initiatives have demonstrated that technology — from accessing detailed maps of the affected area, to turning simple SMS messages into life-saving systems, to establishing broadband Internet connectivity to humanitarian organizations — improves both the speed and substance of relief efforts.

The impact of these voluntary and even spontaneous initiatives was real, measurable, and widely publicized. Their success, even in the absence of any planning or coordination, hints at the true potential of ICTs to revolutionize disaster preparedness and response.

Download and read Mark's article of the play-by-play account of Inveneo’s efforts to reestablish connectivity for humanitarian organizations working in Port-au-Prince immediately after the earthquake, as well as the impact of and challenges involved in those efforts.

He explains how relationships formed through the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) proved critical to the success of these efforts, and our plans for continued collaborative efforts to bring broadband connectivity to the rest of the country, where it is critically needed.

Now if you still question the impact of ICTs or Inveneo in Haiti, then watch this video and listen to Gary Shaye, Country Director for Save the Children, explain how broadband technology does save lives:

Village Telco and OpenBTS are different technologies but they have a lot in common. One big thing they have in common is the belief that telephone networks don't need to be run by top-down command and control organisations, that anyone with some expertise and comparatively modest resources should be able to start their own phone company.

I'll give a brief summary of both and then explain the challenges that each face.

OpenBTS Overview

OpenBTS is an open source GSM base station. It is inexpensive. It costs 5-10% of what a commercial base station costs to deploy. It operates on less that 60W of power which means it's OPEX is dramatically lower than a typical base station which can consume anywhere between 2000 - 8000W depending on its age. It has an equivalent range to commercial BTSes (~20km in 900MHz band).

It has an all IP back-end which makes every mobile phone look like a SIP phone. If ever there was a technology that said "instant phone company" this is it. The Daily Wireless posted a great summary of OpenBTS if you need more detail.

OpenBTS Challenges

The big challenge for OpenBTS is access to spectrum. In Africa, most of the available mobile spectrum in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands have been locked up by mobile operators. They will fight tooth and nail at every turn to block something like OpenBTS disrupting their model. I think the hope for OpenBTS on this continent is to have one of the smaller hungrier mobile operators take up this technology and really focus on rural markets. That said, after Bharti-Airtel's very aggressive moves on pricing in Kenya, perhaps they might interested in something like OpenBTS to further shake up the market. As it happens there is an operator in India called VNL which is using a similar strategy.

From a technological perspective, two limitations to OpenBTS is that it does not yet support GPRS but I gather that will shortly be available, and it does not support handoffs between cells. In terms of deployments, OpenBTS is being deployed for its 4th year at Burning Man but more importantly they have done a deployment on the island of Niue which is more of a real world demonstration of the technology. They may have others that I am not aware of.

Village Telco Overview

The Village Telco by comparison uses low-cost WiFi devices to create a wireless mesh, a cloud of connectivity where each device extends the range of the network. This sort of network has bee commercially deployed by companies like OpenMesh and Meraki in the US. What is unique about Village Telco is the development of a meshed WiFi access point mashed up with an Analogue Telephony Adaptor which is a device that translates the analogue voice signal of an ordinary telephone into digital communication that can be understood by the wireless access point.

This device, which we call the Mesh Potato, then allows you to plug an ordinary phone into it and start making calls. Each device has a range of about 400m on a flat plain or about half that in an urban environment. More on the Village Telco rural voice services business model.

Both OpenBTS and the Village Telco can operate autonomously or even better they can been connected to the VoIP services on the Internet or interconnected with the PSTN and mobile operators.

Village Telco Challenges

With the Village Telco, we deliberately chose unlicensed "WiFi" spectrum in order to drive around the whole spectrum regulatory issue. Although historically this has not been the case in Africa, increasingly Wifi is recognised as unlicensed spectrum by the majority of African countries. This means that you can set up a network without seeking permission from the regulator. Generally, it is only when you start charging money for the telecommunication services that you need to have a telecommunication operators license. In places like Kenya and South Africa you can seek exemption from that as a non-profit. Alternatively, you could affiliate a Village Telco network with an existing VoIP service provider and fly under their wing.

For the Village Telco, WiFi has limitations in that its range is shorter and transmission power is lower. That's the trade-off for being unlicensed. WiFi spectrum doesn't travel through concrete very well, thus WiFi connections ideally have line-of-sight or at least very modest obstacles. That's why we designed the Mesh Potato with a rugged outdoor enclosure so the user can stick the device higher up outside the house if necessary.

For the Village Telco, the deployments to date are quite small because we have been working with a small run of about 200 beta Mesh Potatoes. There is a Village Telco network in Dili, East Timor which is being developed by a local NGO there. And we have small network in Cape Town. Both should grow quickly as soon as the commercial Mesh Potatoes are available. As it happens, they recentlty went on sale if you want one.

This post started as the OpenBTS and Village Telco - low-cost GSM networks email thread