[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[atlarge-discuss] out-outreach



Good morning, Richard and other WG-Outreach members:

    How far out can we reach?

Ron Sherwood


Pedal Power: Look Ma No Wires
 
By Craig Liddell

An innovative, pedal powered, wireless network provides Internet access to 
off-grid villages in Laos.

Jhai PC is a project of non-government organisation (NGO), Jhai Foundation. 

"The equipment will be powered by electricity stored in a car battery charged 
by 'foot cranks'," Lee Thorn, Jhai Foundation chair, explains. These "are 
essentially bicycle wheels and pedals hooked to a small generator. The 
generator is connected to a car battery and the car battery is connected to 
the computer."

"Connection with each computer to the others will be by radio local area 
network (LAN)," he says. "Each village will connect to one repeater station 
powered by a solar means on the ridge near the river valley. That station 
will then send the radio signal to the microwave tower nearby and eventually 
to a server in Vientiane that will connect the villages to the Internet.

The key message of Jhai, which means "hearts and minds working together, is 
reconciliation. Laos is one of poorest countries in the world and, on a per 
capita basis, the most bombed place on Earth. Bounthanh Phommasathit, a 
co-founder of the organisation, was forced to flee her ancestral home in the 
Plain of Jars in Laos following the American bombing campaign during the 
Vietnam War. Thorn, the other co-founder, loaded several of the bombs that 
fell on the Plain of Jars while serving on the USS Ranger, an aircraft 
carrier.

Jhai projects focus on four key areas. These include education, technology, 
health and economic development. The Remote IT Village Initiative and Jhai PC 
are two key technology projects. "What we are trying to do," says Thorn, "is 
give five remote villages which have no electricity or phones, a means of 
communication and the use of simple business tools."

Each village will have a Jhai computer connected in a network with the other 
villages that connects to the Internet and to their high school-based 
Internet Learning Centres (ILC).

The Jhai computers will also provide them with the opportunity to do simple 
business functions like writing documents and creating spreadsheets for 
budgetary and simple accounting purposes.

Lee Felsenstein is a member of the Jhai Board of Advisors and project engineer 
for the Jhai communication project. He, and fellow engineer Mark Summer, are 
volunteering their time. Felsenstein has a long history of public advocacy 
and was a co-founder of The Community Memory Project, a non-profit 
organisation that developed public-access information-exchange systems 
beginning in 1972. He also designed one of the first portable computers for 
Osborne in the early 1980's."The Jhai PC is built of 'embedded' circuit 
boards," says Felsenstein, "of the sort that are used in industrial 
equipment. These are rugged and devoid of moving parts such as fans or disc 
drives, made to operate for long periods of time without service or 
attention. The Jhai computer consists of a single-board PC (the MZ-104 based 
upon the Mach-Z single-chip computer - equivalent to a 133 MHz 486 system)." 
He has analysed the "Internet appliance generation of chips and found this to 
be the best, especially for its low power consumption and remote BIOS reboot 
capability." 

The software is LINUX-based and is being localised into the Lao language by 
Anousak Souphavanh and his team in New York. The system is being configured 
to provide a 'telegraph' (email) and telephone (VOIP communication) among the 
villages, via the Lao phone system, and worldwide through Internet telephony. 

"Along with the processor," Felsenstein continues, "is an adapter card for 
PCMCIA cards, allowing us to use the Cisco Aironet 350 Wi-Fi (802.11b) 
wireless LAN card. A Sound Blaster compatible sound card completes the board 
complement. The three boards, together with a connector-panel board fit 
together in a compact 'stack' and have no case or power supply. We will build 
our own case, using a commercially available die-cast metal housing which 
will seal the boards from the external environment and still allow heat to 
transfer out." 

"The system includes a regulator which doubles as a battery charger," he says, 
"and can operate from a wide range of voltages. We plan to use stationary 
bicycles equipped with generators for charging the batteries. The mountaintop 
relay stations will have solar panels for power, and we hope that the 
villages can also have them, though they are expensive." 

In collaboration with Schools Online, Jhai Foundation has established four 
ILCs in high schools since 2000. All but one are in rural areas. Each 
facility contains 10 new PCs linked in a LAN together with a printer, a 
scanner, four microphones/headsets, and a digital camera. All facilities are 
renovated before they are occupied.

"The network, says Felsenstein, "is basically a star topology, with a 'access 
point' located on a peak overlooking the villages and having an antenna whose 
pattern will encompass them all. Each village has a high-gain parabolic 
antenna with which to reach the peak. The access point will have another 
antenna pointing to another peak, on which will be a relay station - actually 
just another access point but with tightly focused parabolic antennas 
arranged in a line which terminates at Centre in a town." 

There, a terminal computer will interface both with an Internet server, by 
Ethernet, and with the Lao phone system, through an H.323 board. This will be 
able to dial and receive in-country phone calls. The system will be operated 
by teenagers in the villages under the supervision and training of the ILCs. 

"At the moment," he concludes, " we have one computer set up going and are 
using it for development, we have attached a large hard drive to augment the 
96-MByte flash disk. Mark Summer is integrating software, and we have just 
decided to purchase a telephone interface card good for four analog lines. 
The team in Rochester is hard at work localising Linux and the KDE 
environment for the Lao language. Our time line shows us ready to ship in 
October, but that may be revised." 

"This is a world pilot project," says Thorn, "We expect to document it 
extensively. We see it as stage one of a project to link villagers in remote 
areas to each other and to people like us who are interested in Lao 
villagers' success in meeting their own and Lao PDR's goals. We expect that 
Jhai Foundation and especially our Lao consultants will report on this 
experience to interested parties, first, in Lao PDR, and second, elsewhere."