Archive for the 'Village Telco' Category

Village Telco Workshop

Published
by
Steve Song
on 1 July 2008
in Village Telco
. 3 Comments

Hardware testing team At the Shuttleworth Foundation, the geek factor runs pretty high for a charitable foundation.  However, my colleague Jason and I felt like lightweights at the the Village Telco workshop that we hosted here at the Foundation two weeks ago.

You can see the full list of participants here or click here to put a face to all the names but topping out the geek factor at the workshop were David Rowe, Open Hardware pioneer and developer of the Free Telephony Project; Elektra, author of the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh networking protocol; Jeff Wishnie, Chief Technology Officer for Inveneo; and, Alberto Escudero-Pascual of IT46.

Group work The intent of the workshop was to bring together the right people to be able to prototype a Village Telco, with the intention of getting some configurations and code up on to the website so that interested parties would have something to hack on.    As you can see from the picture at left, we had no shortage of wireless hardware to experiment with and four servers lined up to start assembling Village Telco software on.  Well, as they say in the U.S. Army, “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.  We never did build a prototype but we did something better, we brainstormed a new, low-cost startup model for a Village Telco.

Low-cost wireless networking a powerful concept with a thousand potential applications.  Unfortunatley, this strength is also its weakness in helping people get started with low-cost WiFi and VoIP.  Because you can do just about anything, the endless configurability is an intimidating prospect for even the above-average geek.  Our challenge was to create something simple enough to use that an entrepreneur with only modest technical skills could see how to implement and scale up a village telco.

In order to keep the discussion honest, we agreed to use Dabba as the use case against which we would design a solution.  Right now Dabba is operating in South African townships which are typically low-income, high-density and most of which have existing, but arguably expensive or inconvenient, telecoms services from the mobile operators and the incumbent, Telkom.  But even this was not enough to ground the discussion.  We needed to constrain the discussion to something as specific as possible.  At first we talked about what would be required to cover a fixed area, say nine square kilometres, but after some time that seemed too ambitious for a bootstrapping startup.  In the end, we decided to ask the question, “What could be achieved with USD 5000?” and given that investment “Could you break even within six months?”

One early leap forward in the workshop was to recognise the superiority of the Ubiquiti Nanostation as an external access point.  While there is no question that the Linksys WRT54Gx series of wireless routers have played a seminal role in the Open Source movement around wireless networking, there is no getting around the fact that they are designed for indoors and there is a significant cost increase associated with ruggedizing them for outdoors.  The Nanostations cost the same as the WRT54GLs but come pre-built in a ruggedized outdoor housing with mounting brackets.  The Nanostation is also more powerful than the Linksys routers.

Having established a preference, discussion revolved around how open the Ubiquiti Nanostation is.  The Nanostations can run OpenWRT and Inveneo had already had some success compiling the quagga routing protocol to run on it.  Unfortunately, some of the tunable antenna functionality is lost with the OpenWRT software but this is not really a significant factor in the context of the Village Telco.  The amazing thing about having Jeff and Elektra there was that they were able to test on the spot whether B.A.T.M.A.N. could be compiled for OpenWRT on the Nanostation.  A couple of hours of quiet conspiring later and presto, the mesh protocol was running on the Nanostation!

While the idea of a mesh network is to have each node extend the mesh, a good first step for a Village Telco would be to start with a “Super Node” which would help the Village Telco Entrepreneur (VTE).  A Super Node might be three Ubiquiti Nanostations mounted on a single pole above the premises of the VTE.  This would offer a 2 kilometre radius of coverage to the Village Telco.

However, the Super Node reaching 2 kilometres is not the same as a VoIP handset reaching back that same distance.  We had been thinking of typical wireless VoIP handsets such as the one by UT Starcom pictured at right.  While this kind of device offers signficant advantages such as mobility and a built-in battery, it is also true that the range of such a phone is only about a 100 metres.  Using this kind of phone would mean a dramatic increase in the number of wireless access points required to give service to a particular area.  We either needed to think of a way of driving down the cost of an access point or increasing the power of the customer’s equipment.

As an aside, the two key cost factors that emerged in the scale-up of the Village Telco concept were a) the cost of the customer’s phone or Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) as I believe it is called in the trade; and, b) the cost of power supply to the wireless mesh access points.  We made the assumption that it was critical for the network to have guaranteed power but that it was a nice-to-have rather than a must-have for the CPE.

As we brainstormed how to drive down the cost of the CPE, we discussed the potential of small mini-APs such as the Accton Mini-router sold by OpenMesh.  These tiny APs are capable of running an adapted version of B.A.T.M.A.N. called, yes you guessed it, Robin.  The combination of an OpenMesh router and a SIP phone would provide the CPE needed for a Village Telco.  However, SIP phones are stMesh Potatoill not that cheap.  We decided that what would be ideal would be a combination of a simple Analogue Telephony Adaptor (ATA) combined with something like an Open Mesh mini-router.  There is something to be said for having equipment right in front of you because the idea of actually gaffer-taping an ATA to an Open Mesh router actually struck a chord with the workshop.

With a less amazing group, the conversation might have stopped there but as it turned out we brainstormed the existence of a device which we decided to call a Mesh Potato which would combine the functionality of an ATA and a mesh AP, and would be low-power, Open Source, Open Hardware, pre-ruggedized for outdoors and be easy-to-install and manage.  Target cost of such a device would be sub USD 60 per device.  In quantity, should we pull this off, the cost should be much lower.

So, with that we came to our 5000 dollar recipe for a Village Telco startup.  USD 5000 should get you a server and printer (for pay-as-you-go coupons) running Asterisk and A2billing (modified into simple management framework), an Ubiquiti Nanostation-based Super Node and about 40 Mesh Potatoes or in other words something like this:

In my next post, I’ll talk more about scope of work involved in bringing these ideas to fruition. In the mean time, you can read the raw outputs of the workshop at http://wiki.villagetelco.org.  If you are interested in getting involved as a developer, please sign up to the Village Telco development list at http://groups.google.com/group/village-telco-dev.

Dabba and Village Telco: Getting to Alpha

Published
by
Steve Song
on 29 April 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 3 Comments

Here is a short note on where things stand with Dabba and the Village Telco. The Shuttleworth Foundation is planning to fund the hacking/adaptation/development, to at least alpha version, of an Open Source “Village Telco” integrated suite of applications. This will be developed based on the business model established by Dabba in Orange Farm and aimed at facilitating the replication of that model.

Dabba brainstorming with Internet SolutionsA lot of the detail written below came out of a half-day brainstorming session that I participated in earlier this month. Rael hosted myself and a three very cool business development / technical / entrepreneur folk from Internet Solutions. Internet Solutions have informally supported Dabba in exploring low-cost telephony and data business models from the very early days. They have an interest since businesses like Dabba are a potentially natural complement to Internet Solutions. I hope in my meeting with them that I also convinced them that there was a useful and important place for an Open Source VillageTelco project which could speed the replication of Dabba-clients and Dabba-like enterprises.

So, as currently planned, the first iteration of the Village Telco will include:

  • mesh network provisioning and management
  • pay-as-you-go billing and management
  • wireless access / captive portal setup and management
  • SIP/VOIP server and client management
  • least cost routing solutions

subsequent iterations will include:

  • an integrated web-based management interface to the Village Telco
  • content server
  • customer relationship management (CRM)
  • caching proxy for web content
  • multicast streaming video

So here is a little more detail on what is required to get each of those components off the ground.

Mesh Network Provisioning & Management

open-mesh.netOpen-mesh.com and Meraki have the slickest mesh network provisioning and management interfaces going. Both are based on the deployment of Meraki wireless routers which run a version of the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol called RO.B.IN (ROuting Batman INside). Both Open-Mesh and Meraki have very similar interfaces which is not surprising as Open-Mesh was developed as a reaction to Meraki’s decision to close the change to their End User Licence Agreement to preclude anyone from changing any of the software that they install on their units. So now you can buy a Meraki mini router, flash it with Open-Mesh’s more open firmware and connect up your mesh without being locked into Meraki. Pretty cool although you still have to use the OpenMesh site for network management. It would be much better for a Village Telco to have its own network management software that was as cool as Open-Mesh. Happily a group of students at UNC Chapel Hill are developing an Open Source mesh deployment server called OrangeMesh that is compatible with Open-Mesh. This would be a great place to start developing a provisioning interface for a Village Telco, one that would ideally handle both OpenWRT/LinksysWRT54Gx routers running B.A.T.M.A.N. and Meraki Mini or similar devices running RO.B.IN.

Pay-as-you-go Billing and Management

A2Billing appear to have the most robust Open Source voice billing solution for Asterisk that supports pay-as-you-go billing. The goal here would be to create a customised A2Billing configuration particularly geared to the Village Telco environment.

Wireless Access / Captive Portal Setup and Management

Image from CoovaChilli siteThere are a few great Open Source captive portal applications. Coova, ChilliSpot, and WiFiDog are probably the best known although Chillispot ceased development some time in 2007 and has morphed into CoovaChilli and there are other hybrids such as CoovaAAAwithWiFiDog. WiFiDog has a great captive portal and customised/localised content for users but relies on a standard password file for authentication which probably means that it will not scale well. Both Coova and WiFiDog have versions of their captive portal software that are designed to run on wireless access points (APs) such as the Linksys WRT54G series. While the Village Telco will use Linksys APs, because the APs will be meshed together, there is no need to run authentication on the local AP. It can be handled at the server. Something like CoovaChilli makes more sense because it authenticates with Radius but it would be nice to also have some of WiFiDog’s captive portal features as well. It sounds like CoovaAAAwithWifiDog should do that but CoovaAAA is a service not a software provided by Coova. For anyone who read my earlier post, you will note that authenticating from the server versus the AP represents a change of strategy.

SIP/VOIP server and client management

AsteriskThe two big applications for SIP authenticating and managing VoIP traffic are OpenSER and Asterisk. In my earlier post, I wrote about running OpenSER on a Linksys AP. Once again, in a mesh environment, it seems that this is not necessary either. OpenSER’s chief advantage over Asterisk in this domain is that it is comparatively very efficient and would be able to route calls within the AP’s coverage area without leaving the AP to authenticate at the server. There are even some very cool OpenSER distributions designed for the Linksys AP such as Milkfish. However, the downside of this is that those calls would not get tracked or would at least be much more work to track. Having a central authentication for calls makes sense as tracking usage patterns will be quite important to managing service delivery and growth. In the end, it probably makes more sense to have a single Asterisk implementation that handles authentication. Once again, because the network is meshed, this should be relatively seamless across APs.

Least Cost Routing Solutions

Least Cost Routing (LCR) refers to the set of tables, software, appliances that ensure that a call is made for the least possible cost. So, for a Village Telco, you would first want to make sure that calls within the WiFi mesh were routed directly to another user within the mesh. Next, if the call were leaving the VillageTelco coverage area, then you would want to have direct connections to all the major networks in order to avoid paying additional interconnect charges. This means having the SIM cards and hardware to route calls to the GSM networks and having the facility to interconnect with the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) e.g. Telkom. There is a host of hardware and software for achieving this and part of the challenge will be choosing the right technology. Equally if not more important will be deciding where in the connectivity chain to break out to other networks. In some cases, an isolated Village Telco would have to solve all of these problems by themselves. However in the case of Dabba in South Africa, Dabba can solve many of these problems for local Village Telcos by offering LCR services (among other services) to Village Telco operators. This is particularly important in a place like South Africa where Telkom insists on having carrier-grade interconnection equipment which is typically very expensive.

Customer Relationship Management

Vtiger The above covers most of the basics of the Village Telco but thinking further forward, it would be great for the Village Telco operator to have the tools to manage relationships with his/her customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Vtiger could offer marketing and support functions to a Village Telco operator that would help them expand their range of services, provide better support, and generally understand their customers better. However, one step at a time and much will depend on how easy it is to integrate something like Vtiger with the other elements of the Village Telco.

That’s a start. Obviously much more to come. Please feel free to post comments, observations, suggestions on the above as this is definitely a work in progress. Also, I’m learning in this space as well so if I have misrepresented issues, forgotten issues, or left out an amazing piece of Open Source software, let me know!

For more software and hardware possibilities, check out the list compiled by Sebastian Beuttrich for the CSIR’s Wireless Africa initiative.

Looking for Possible Village Telco Entrepreneurs in Khayalitsha

Published
by
Steve Song
on 16 April 2008
in Village Telco
. 1 Comment

Visits in KhayalitshaHaving decided to help Dabba explore the replication of their Orange Farm success down here in the Western Cape, it was not immediately clear to me how to go about finding the right place for such a project. Alan Levine of Vanilla (Dabba’s partner in the Cape) initially provided a connection to a local NGO working with schools to provide support services to children affected by HIV to enter formal schooling with the necessary skills. However, after visiting the NGO sites, it was evident that while there was interest in the Village Telco concept, technology and entrepreneurship were not their sweet spot. They could see the value and would make great clients but were not the sort of organisation to drive an idea like this.

So, how does one go about finding a Village Telco entrepreneur? Finding the right partner is an all-to-common problem for philanthropists who know (or are at least convinced that they know) what the right thing to do is but have no idea how to find the right people to invest in. Calls for proposals often don’t work because they prioritize the ability to write a proposal not the ability to get the job done. They also tend to attract the usual suspects. So what do to?

I am embarrassed to say that the answer was simple, so simple it pains me to reveal it. It was this: drive around. In chatting with my colleage Jason, it transpired that a few years ago, he had provided some mentoring support to a startup cyber cafe called Khaynet in Khayalitsha. He suggested we check them out. This potential lead inspired Alan and I to go and do some scouting of Cyber cafes and related businesses in Khayalitsha.

Being a recent returnee to South Africa and a newcomer to the Western Cape, I had no idea whether driving around Khayalitsha was a clever thing for two white guys to do. I relied on Alan’s experience. So far I have found it pretty hard to generalise about personal safety in South Africa, especially in the Cape where I am still finding my bearings. Having said that, from my perspective, the most important thing one can do is actively take reasonable risks. Failing to do that in South Africa runs the risk of entrenching the racial divide. And the Cape is a place where the racial divide is still starkly evident. I live and work in very white Durbanville and Khayalitsha is only about 20kms south but racially is a polaroid negative of Durbanville.

Alan and I set out looking for shopping malls, community centres, skills training centres, or anything that looked like local IT or telecom enterprise. The first place we found was at the Zenzele training centre which we happened upon by accident. This is a very cool non-profit initiative doing training and entrepreneurial skills development in woodworking, sewing, steelwork, and a variety of other areas. They actually had an Cyber entrepreneur as one of their denizens but that particular shop/consultancy was not open on the day we visited. Once again, Zenzele seemed like they might make better clients of a Village Telco than operators.

KhaynetOur next stop was to follow up on Jason’s suggestion and visit Khaynet. Khaynet is in the Sanlam shopping centre (pictured at left) next to a busy commuter train station. The shopping mall was a hive of activity. We found Mandla Oliphant, one of the founders of Khaynet, in the cyber cafe. The cafe was busy but with few people using the computer terminals. The principal demand was for photocopies, printing, faxes, etc. In conversation with Mandla, he confirmed that demand for Internet access was fairly modest while demand for “office” services were the principal source of revenue. He confirmed that phone access is a much bigger priority for people than Internet access. Khaynet has been in business since 2003 but have struggled to find a thriving business model based on Internet services. Mandla thought that demand for low-cost phone access would be high in that region. He mentioned that the VoIP startup Digital Indaba had been offering services in the area but that take-up had been mixed due to quality and cost issues. All in all, it seemed to me that a Village Telco would offer Mandla exactly the kind of value-added services that might help Khaynet thrive.

Buoyed up by the opportunity that the Sanlam Centre and nearby train station seemed to represent, we then drove to the other side of Khayalitsha to the Khayalitsha Mall. This is a brand new shopping centre that is clearly more up-market than the Sanlam centre. Alan and I rambled about the entire centre looking for IT or telecom related enterprises. We had almost given up when we came across Silulo Ulutho Internet Cafe (pictured at right). Business at Silulo was booming. The left side of the cafe was devoted to Internet access and office services. Similar to Khaynet there was a strong focus on value-added office services although in the case of Silulo, most of the computers for Internet access were in use. On the right side of the cafe was a bank of pay phones franchised from Vodacom. This was operated by a separate business to Silulo with whom they had a relationship.

We met with Sigqibo Pangabantu, one of the owners, and he told us a little bit about Silulo. Silulo Ulutho Technologies offers a range of services from retail computer sales and service, to office and cyber cafe facilities, training, business advice and online marketing. This was one of their two office locations. In order to keep up with demand and for reliability, they maintain two Internet connections: a Telkom ADSL line and a wireless link to 24-7online. Silulo is obviously a thriving enterprise. I could see them offering WiFi voice and data services in the area. I could see a Village Telco in operation here but I could also see the potential of something like a pre-configured version of David Rowe’s IPO8 offering a drop-in replacement for the kind of franchised community phone shop service offered by Vodacom.

Both Mandla and Sigqibo have expressed an interest in finding out more about the Village Telco and the ball in now in Dabba’s court to explore the next step with them. Stand by for more news.

P.S. The map at the top of the post came from streetmaps.co.za which is currently knocking the spots off Google Maps in South Africa.

Dabba: Open Source Components - Access Node

Published
by
Steve Song
on 20 March 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 0 Comments

Dabba relies on a variety of Open Source software application to enable their network. Here is a profile of some of those applications.

Wireless Access Point

Anatomy of a Community Mesh Access PointEvery local connection starts with a wireless access point (AP) that connects phones and computers alike to the Dabba network. These APs rely entirely on a suite of Open Source programs. I should point out that what I am about to describe is the latest in an evolution of strategies for access points for Dabba. In this latest iteration, a clever antenna enclosure made by poynting.co.za harbours a Linksys router.

OpenWRT home pageEach Linksys router has had it’s firmware (its internal operating system) replaced with an Open Source alternative called OpenWRT. This software expands the range of control that a user has over the device and offers the potential for installing additional software. A large developer community has developed around initiatives such as OpenWRT and there are many similar initiatives such as DD-WRT, Tomato, and others.

B.A.T.M.A.N. logoNow that the router has a flexible, adaptable Operating System, the next installation is B.A.T.M.A.N. This is a mesh networking algorithm developed by the Freifunk community. B.A.T.M.A.N. which stands for “Better Approach to Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking” is an improvement on the OLSR protocol developed by the same community. It allows wireless nodes to seamlessly and automatically configure and re-configure themselves into a cohesive network. This is transparent to the user connected to the network. Meshing offers the potential to dynamically deploy wireless networking by simply and transparently adding nodes to a wireless network.

OpenSER logoNext there is OpenSER (Open SIP Express Router) is a high-performance, configurable, Open Source, SIP ( RFC3261 ) server which can connect, authenticate, and route calls from SIP phones. It has the advantage of having a very small footprint and being quite efficient which makes it ideal for use on Linksys routers. It also means that each wireless node can route local calls directly from phone to phone without needing to refer them to a central server.

Coova logoFinally, there is Coova. Coova makes captive portal software which allows each wireless access point to authenticate data users i.e. people who connect to the network with a laptop or smartphone browser. The portal ensures that users authenticate via pay-as-you-go data cards. SIP phones are passed through directly and authenticated via a separate system. More about that later. One of the challenges of automating and simplifying the function of these wireless nodes is to have voice and data systems authenticate against a common database of users so that clients can have both voice and data credit in a single account.

Antenna and Solar Panel It is remarkable to think that all of these Open Source applications can reside on a single inexpensive wireless router like the Linksys WRT54GL or GS. You can see here at the left Rael is demonstrating how the antenna with embedded router can be connected to a small solar panel to create a completely self-sustaining wireless access node.

In a future post I’ll talk more aobut the software that runs on the back end of Dabba’s systems.

Kenya: Door opens for new non-profit telecom firms

Published
by
Steve Song
on 17 March 2008
in Telecom Policy and Village Telco
. 0 Comments

Business Day Africa profiles the Communications Commission of Kenya’s decision to offer ISM-band spectrum to non-profits:

“Licence-free band spectrum, courtesy of the airwaves’ regulator, could allow non-profit organisations to own and operate telecom companies.

The Communication Commission of Kenya’s offer of the ISM Band 2.4 and 5.8 spectrum to registered community groups is on a first-come-first-served basis, and already organisations from Mukurweini, Khwisero, Limuru and Rangwe have expressed interest. Countries like Tanzania, Namibia, Bangladesh and India have used the concept of free frequencies in efforts to bridge the ‘digital divide’ with the West.”

This paves the way for the creation of VillageTelcos in Kenya. Comparisons may be odious but it is hard to resist comparing the forward-looking approach of the CCK to the foot-dragging, bureaucratic style of ICASA, who it appears will miss their deadline for converting telecommunications operators and VANs licensees to the new electronic communications network services (ECNS) licenses.