Digital Gangetic Plains(DGP): 802.11-based Low-Cost Networking for Rural Areas

The past decade has seen communication revolution in the form of cellular telephony as well as the Internet, but much of it has been restricted to the developed world and metropolitan pockets in the developing world. While the use of cellular technologies can cut down on the time to deploy access networks, the cost economics make this non-viable in growing telecom economies. In the Digital Gangetic Plains (DGP) project, we have been exploring the use of 802.11 as a long-distance access technology. 802.11, popularly known as WiFi, is currently cost-priced since it is an open/inter-operable standard, and hence is attractive for low cost and rapid deployment in rural areas. We have built an extensive testbed in a rural setting consisting of directional 802.11 links, spanning up to about 80km at its longest. The testbed is set in the Kanpur-Lucknow corridor of the Gangetic Plains. To our knowledge such a long-distance, multi-hop testbed based on 802.11 is unique thus far. While 802.11 is attractive in terms of cost economics, it was inherently designed for indoor use. Our novel use of the technology for outdoor, long-distance access links presents several challenges. Our experience with the testbed has brought several research as well as operational issues to the fore. Our contributions in this project thus far include: (1) demonstration of technical feasibility of using 802.11 for rural Internet connectivity, (2) an understanding of several operational and cost issues, (3) various technical contributions, (4) demonstration of and experience with various services on the testbed network, as well as (5) identification of various technical and operational issues going forward. In this report, we document our experiences with this technology, our contributions in this project, as well as the novel technical and operational challenges that lie ahead in using 802.11 to bridge the digital divide. A project supported by Media Labs Asia