Very low-cost Internet access in rural areas using KioskNet

This is an article I wrote for Saatva:

Rural areas in developing countries are deprived of access to information. This is because it is often economically unviable to provide telecommunication services in remote villages; or even if the infrastructure is available, high cost of usage and illiteracy among the villagers reduce the abilities of the poorest sections of society to take advantage of the modern communication systems. A solution that has proved effective in recent years is that of setting up rural Internet kiosks (also known as telecenters) in the villages. A typical kiosk houses a few computers having Internet connectivity, and is operated by staff recruited from among the local community members. Sharing of the kiosk infrastructure among many people effectively reduces its cost for the people. And the kiosk staff members who are trained in basic computer skills are able to serve as an intermediary to help even illiterate people find useful information on the Internet. Kiosks can also be made economically sustainable by charging a small fee from the people using them.

There are now literally thousands of telecenters across Africa, Latin America, and even in India. In fact, the Government of India is supporting a programme called Mission 2007, with the goal of setting up a kiosk in each of the 600,000 villages of India. Stories abound of how very useful medical and agricultural information distributed through such kiosks has helped hundreds of people to adopt healthier lifestyles and improve farmland productivity. Access to the most recent weather forecasts and crop procurement prices in nearby markets has given even further control to the farmers to make better decisions for crop harvesting and sales. Even other programmes such as watershed development, microfinance, and rural electrification have received a boost from hearing and learning about similar activities pursued in different parts of the world. Yet another useful application supported by many telecenters is that of e-government services, such as automation of land records, and requests for birth, marriage, and income certificates. It is hard to deny the tremendous advantages of kiosks to provide information in rural areas.

However, kiosks face many practical problems. Due to limited electrical power, pervasive dust, mechanical wear-and-tear, and computer viruses, kiosk computers often fail, requiring frequent (and expensive) repairs. Similarly, network connectivity is often lost due to failures in the communication system. Dial-up are cellular-data connections are very slow and flaky. Satellite terminals are expensive, and have large power requirements to operate. Other solutions such as long-distance wireless links require expensive and sturdy towers because the antennas often lose alignment with each other in strong winds. Faced with high costs and unreliable service delivery, customers quickly lose interest, and kiosk deployments often become unsustainable in the long term.



Our research group has built the KioskNet system by approaching these problems from a holistic standpoint. KioskNet attempts to make a kiosk more robust without increasing its cost. It uses a low-cost and low-power single-board-computer as a kiosk controller at each kiosk. This runs from a car battery charged using solar power, to ensure 24 hours of up-time. The controller provides a network file-system for PCs running at the kiosk. These PCs are typically recycled PCs, and do not need a hard-disk; they boot from the kiosk controller itself. Kiosk controllers are reasonably tamper-proof so they offer reliable virus-free boot images and binaries. Since we do not use the PC’s hard disk, it avoids hard disk failures and disk-resident viruses. Moreover, recycled PCs are cheap and spare parts are widely available.

The controller can communicate wirelessly with another single-board computer mounted on a vehicle, powered from the battery of the vehicle itself. These vehicles may belong to government officers who regularly visit the villages, or taxi owners who operate in the area, or transportation providers who carry goods and groceries back and forth between villages and cities. The computers on the vehicles automatically pick-up or drop-off data wirelessly at the kiosks, and carry it to and from an Internet gateway typically in a city. Even during a few seconds of connectivity while a vehicle simply drives a past or gateway, almost 100MB of data can be exchanged. This ‘mechanical backhaul’ avoids the cost of trenches, towers, and satellite dishes, allowing Internet access even in remote areas, though at the cost of increased end-to-end delay. In areas where dial-up, long-range wireless or cellular phone service is available, the kiosk controller can be configured to use these communication links in conjunction with mechanical backhaul.

We did a successful pilot deployment of the KioskNet system in May 2006 at a kiosk in the Anandpuram village of the Vishakapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh. Some pictures from the deployment are shown in Fig. 1. We plan to do a bigger deployment soon to verify many of our assumptions and observe the system carefully. Please let us know if you are interested to use or experiment with KioskNet. More information, including links to papers, technical details, and cost estimates can be found on our website:
http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/tetherless/index.php/KioskNet