Barrio Malawi - VSAT

Case Study: Overcoming the Digital Divide in Malawi

jon — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:04:20 -0500

Our last week in Malawi, and there is one final success story to report! It seems the internet connectivity will be coming this year to the development offices of the CCAP church (Church of Central Africa Presbyterian) in Ekwendeni (just 15km north of Mzuzu). I am very excited. Some of the most effective aide offices in all of Malawi are based in Ekwendeni and run by the CCAP church there. Decent internet connectivity is only going to increase the productivity of people who are already doing some of the most effective development work in Malawi: fighting the spread of AIDS, opening clean water sources, treating sickness, and creating education and job opportunities for Malawians.

The manner in which the offices and organizations of Ekwendeni were able to "bridge the Digtial Divide" and obtain internet connectivity is fascinating and, I think, useful for others in remote parts of the world who are interested in connecting. There are three steps to achieving connectivity off the main communications grid:

Resource Pooling
Often connectivity options are only accessible if a number of people and organizations pool their financial resources together. In the case of Ekwendeni in Malawi, the CCAP church offices there were each asked how much per month they could contribute to internet connectivity per month and front for installation costs at their office.

Once the budget was finalized various ISPs in the capital city Lilongwe were approached with the budgets and asked to submit competitive proposals for providing as much bandwidth as possible given the budget constraints of the CCAP offices. Also companies were asked to provide plans for sharing the connection among the various offices once internet connectivity had been establish successfully to a single point on the CCAP campus.

Within one month 4 companies had responded. One said that they could not offer anything for the budget that CCAP had provided. Three others returned with proposals for various different connectivity options.

By pooling resources and approaching the ISPs directly, the offices of the CCAP retroactively created a market and brought it to the attention of ISPs that were too far away and too unaware of the connectivity needs 500km away. This approach was much more effective that their previous attempts where they had called up ISPs and simply said that they were "interested in getting an internet connection". For the ISPs in the capital city, everyone is "interested in getting a connection", the trick is identifying serious buyers who have enough resources to pay. The resource pooling strategy gave ISPs a immediate idea of the seriousness of the CCAP and brought to their attention that connecting the CCAP would be profitable endeavor.

Engineering as Development
From the standpoint of the ISPs, the proposal by CCAP came at a very fortunate time. Until very recently, the only option for connecting a site like Ekwendeni had been to license and install a dedicated VSAT satellite internet connection. It was only within the last year that some new wireless technology allowed ISPs to use existing cell phone towers to relay data back to shared VSATs in larger cities from remote areas.

These new technologies drastically lowered the price of connecting remote places like Equindeni, and made it possible for some the of ISPs to offer profitable internet service to the CCAP.

Macro Level Internet Policy
The national regulation of the internet in Malawi also played a huge role in the internet connectivity of CCAP in Ekwendeni. In Malawi, there are steep regulation fees that must be paid on VSAT internet connections. These fees are so steep that they effectively price a VSAT out of the budget of the CCAP. During the time when the VSAT was the only connectivity option, essentially this meant that these fines priced the whole internet out of the budget of the CCAP.

But with the new cellular rely wireless technology, that is not tightly regulated by the government, it became affordable for CCAP to connect. While these regulations are out of the power of individuals and organizations to control, individual organizations can play a role in publicizing their inefficiencies and ineffectiveness to the government and to decision makers.

Conclusion
It was the combination of resource pooling, engineering, policy that finally made the CCAP a true market for high speed internet connectivity. The combination of these three factors all coming together at the right time are finally what will bring reliable, powerful, capable connectivity to the office of the CCAP that were once on the wrong side of the Digital Divide.

Presentation: The Status and Future of Mzuzu University Internet Connectivity

jon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 04:54:06 -0500

Over the past several months the ICT department of the Library has conducted an extensive analysis of Internet connectivity at Mzuzu University. Nkhaniyawo Nyirenda, of Mzuzu University, and Jon Saints, of The University of Arizona, will present the results of the analysis in order to educate and inform users of the Internet and influence future Internet policy decisions.

All members of staff and students and the general public are invited to attend.

Following the presentation there will a discussion session for members of staff
involved in ICT policy making.Presentation Discussion

Location: Mzuzu University Children’s Library
Date: November 24th 2006
Time: 1300 hours

VSAT Community Networks

jon — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:15:47 -0400

I just read that the internet is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Most of us here in Africa are connecting via satellite or VSAT connections which are a fairly expensive way to transmit data (though costs are rapidly dropping). While I am finding sufficient knowledge on how to purchase VSATs, I have found very little discussion or collaboration online concerning how best to maintain VSAT internet connections.

Just yesterday I received an email from a friend here in Malawi describing the experience of another friend who “successfully” installed a VSAT connection for their NGO. The NGO found that the the installers from the company they hired to install the VSAT “haven't got a clue [how to install a VSAT]. It took them over 10 days to get it running - basically they installed it and it didn't work and they couldn't work out why.” After asking help from a local internet cafe owner the NGO found “the VSAT company had supplied the wrong kind of network cable (not a cross over one) - a fairly basic mistake and they haven't apologised or anything - so we're not really very impressed.”

Poor quality technical support seems to be a common complaint of those organizations installing VSATs. Often the price for poor technical support in VSAT service contracts is very high. Organizations are usually asked to pay travel, room and board expenses for foreign technical support consultants in addition to paying fees for fixing connection problems. In the case of the University here in Mzuzu, we have found that maintaining the connection can be challenging because the network infrastructure was designed by outside consultants. Very few of the skills needed to keep the VSAT running optimally were transferred in documentation or training to the University IT staff.

Here in Mzuzu there is some consensus that organizations using VSATs could themselves improve technical support services while reducing service contract costs by collaborating online. We are interested in creating an online community to help other organizations around the world sustain and manage their VSAT internet connections. This would include: tools/guides to help organizations estimate and budget for usage costs, a tutorial collection to help build staff capacity for maintaining the VSAT and reduce dependence on outside consultants, a collection of success stories and best practices/uses for internet (giving professors blogs, etc), an online forum for technical questions to be answered by other members of VSAT community.

The other phase of our work here involves designing open source software to control, allocate and optimize network bandwidth on the VSAT (as I discussed before). I truly believe that this is the this is the other piece of the puzzle that could really fuel of fire of internet development here in Africa. User friendly software that turns old PCs into network appliances for allocating bandwidth would empower community groups, NGOs, churches, universities, and cities and allow them to collectively purchase VSAT equipment and distrubute and manage their bandwidth according each organizations contribution towards the connection cost.

I have found that the NoCat (http://www.nocat.net) project is pretty much what we need to begin allocating bandwidth based upon user logins. It is a great community networking product, but the problem is, the project stopped development sometime in 2004. Currently assessing the state of the NoCat code to see if it suits our needs and can be built upon. We are also looking into rolling out our own system.

Here is a more technical details of the community network system we are trying to create:

Place a Linux authentication gateway to filter all network traffic just before it is sent out the VSAT to the rest of the world
The authentication gateway should optionally allow unlimited local network traffic (email, file and print sharing, web browsing)
When a user tries to send data out to the world through the VSAT, the authentication gateway captures the request and the user is asked to login
After logging in network bandwidth limits are set on the gateway on a per user basis according to which network privileges the user has been granted. These are settings controlled by the network administrator.
The user is shown how much network time they have remaining in their account, how much bandwidth has been allocated to them etc.
The user is redirected to the website the originally requested before the capture. A small javascipt frame in the web browser continually checks in with the authentication gateway so that the gateway knows the user is still using the network.
Once logged in the user can send any type of network requests that are permitted by the network administrator through the VSAT
To end the VSAT network session the user closes their web browser
The authentication gateway notices that the user has not checked in for some time and closes network access to the VSAT for the user.

NoCat does most of this already, but is lacking an accounting system that would permit easy creation of network access limits for groups of users. Now to figure out if we can add it to the system... I love nerding.

One thousand roads and no highway...

jon — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:57:19 -0500

Three days into our Malawi adventure and my head is full of questions. I think that I have pieced together a reasonable view of what the internet infrastructure looks like in Malawi through various meetings at the US embassy here in Lilongwe.

It seems that in Malawi, any government office, international organization or private company who wants to connect to the internet does so by buying their own VSAT satellites. Its essentially every person for themselves, as each organization takes their chunk of capital and builds their own personal pipeline.

Its as if a village of people wanted to travel to a distant city, instead of pooling resources to build a highway that would provide faster/more reliable/efficient transportation, the people each decided to carve their own individual narrow roads to the far away city. There is an unbelieved able amount of upkeep and investment costs associated with keeping these "individual roads" or fragmented internet oasises running.

This fragmentation is frustrating to me, again, I am new here, but it seems that these VSATs are very sort-term and individualized solutions that serve very few people. They could never really be the economic catalysts to Malawi that I think the internet should be. Maybe I am naive, but It makes me wonder if some sort of resource pooling campaign couldn't be possible to link up to the nearest fiber connection here in Africa?

There is a rumor here in Malawi that there is no wire that crosses the Malawian border... not power... not electricity... not data.

I wonder where the nearest fiber optic cable is to Malawi? Who could I begin asking? Could it be streched here?