Tag Archive for ‘VOIP’ at Many Possibilities

Meet Rael Lissoos, a economist turned geek entrepreneur. While I have been talking about Village Telcos, Rael has been out building one in Orange Farm, a township about an hour south of Johannesburg.

Rael’s company, Dabba.co.za, provides inexpensive voice and data services to residents, businesses, and community centres in Orange Farm. What is remarkable about this is that he has been able to set up most of his telecommunications infrastructure inexpensively using Open Source software and commodity wireless devices. Through this service he is able provide free local calls to anyone within wireless range of his network. Dabba interconnects with Telkom, Vodacom, and CellC offering Dabba callers the possibility of connecting into the national fixed and mobile networks. Dabba offers this service at the same cost as making a phone call from a community container, with the added convenience that users can do so from their own homes.

Payment is made, as you might expect, via pay-as-you-go cards. Dabba offers both voice and data pay-as-you-go cards. A voice voucher is seen at the right. Rael says that initially the pay-as-you-go system was as simple as printing access numbers on paper and sealing them in paper envelopes. Dabba is more sophisticated now and prints elegant looking vouchers which are heat-sealed in plastic envelopes.

Rael has been working on VoIP service delivery in Orange Farm for a couple of years now and has experimented with a wide range of wireless radios and antennae. He has now settled on simple commodity wireless routers such as the Linksys WRT54G range of routers. These devices can have their internal software (firmware) replaced with Open Source software that allows the router to run mesh networking and VoIP applications. This means that a R700 router can be turned into a powerful device for delivering local voice and data services. Each router is capable of networking (meshing) seamlessly with others nearby creating an inexpensive web of connectivity. Combined with software to manage access and billing, you have the seeds of a powerful local telephony and data solution.

Dabba delivers local voice access to the network through a pre-configured VoIP phone. The SMC handset to the left is an example of a wireless VoIP phone. As an example, it is still a bit expensive at about R1000 per handset. Rael reckons that wireless VoIP phones can be found (in quantity) for under R500 each.

Dabba have also been providing local phones by mashing up inexpensive SIP phones and wireless access points. The Dabba user at the right is using a typical SIP phone with wireless connection. Costs for this type of phone are also in the R500 range. It is an interesting question as to whether having a “fixed” wireless phone in one’s house is perceived to have lower or equal value to having something like the SMC phone above.

Dabba offers pay-as-you-go data vouchers as well. Anyone accessing the Internet via Dabba’s wireless mesh is presented with a login screen to validate their voucher. While this is pretty straightforward at the moment, local access control could be connected with local advertising, presence, or a variety of features tuned to the local community and economy.

Dabba also offers “Public Phone Username” cards (seen at right) which allow users to access phone services from any phone on the Dabba network. Last but not least, because Dabba is a value added network (VAN) service provider in South Africa, they are able to offer their users their own telephone numbers dialable from any telephone network. This is getting very close to a full-service yet low-cost telephone network.

Dabba have been extremely innovative in how they deploy access points in the community. In some cases, they have partnered with local business such as the funeral parlour, pictured at left. In other cases, they have hosted access points in local houses in exchange for free access for the householder. Most ambitiously they have negotiated with the local sportsplex to set up solar-powered access points on top of the lighting towers illuminating the sports field. I think this kind of organic, local engagement is critical to the success of initiatives like this.

I think the time has arrived in South Africa for this model of entrepreneurship to take off. In fact, we may be nearing a “perfect storm” for the growth of such business models. Regulation is on the verge of allowing any VAN to operate as a telephone company. Even as we speak Cisco is investing in training in technically savvy entrepreneurs in South Africa in low-cost wireless deployment. At the same time, the the Meraka Institute at the CSIR is working on perfecting mesh networking protocols that Dabba are planning to roll out in their network. Here in my roll at the Shuttleworth Foundation, I am both keen to see Dabba succeed in South Africa and keen to see the business model for a “Village Telco” commoditised into something that could spread virally very quickly. If you’re interested in helping build a Open Source low-cost Village Telco model that would help others get started like Dabba, please get in touch.

Having funded and watched and occasionally participated in the wireless hacker space in Africa for the last few years, I have the sense of “waiting for the next leap forward”. Wireless hackers have been successfully building cantennas, woktennas, and waterbottletennas, to name a few. They’ve been flashing Linksys Routers with a variety of free firmware replacements and in general tinkering with WiFi in a very cool way. I say cool because I think tinkering is one of the best ways of learning about something and also because taking something apart is a way of demystifying technology and ultimately making it something that serves you as opposed to the other way around.

There have been quite a number of initiatives in this space, some grassroots, some donor initiated and most have been successful in crossing that first bridge, of developing a level of comfort in adapting a commodity technology to serve a local purpose. As I say, I think this alone is an important outcome. Having said that, it feels as if a certain “so-what” stage has been reached. If you have good connectivity, WiFi can be a natural way to distribute access and to forge local broadband links up to x kilometres away. However, connectivity in Africa is still both scarce and expensive. This means that there is limited utility to basic wireless solutions. Something more generically useful and applicable is needed.

Think Fon but for Rural Voice Services in Africa

That thing, I think, is a “village telco” and by that I mean an easy-to-use connectivity solution that provides extensible local telephony with the possibility of upstream voice and/or data connectivity via POTS, mobile, or other IP services.

In a perfect world, this would be an out-of-the-box solution which provides an Asterisk PABX/telco along with a number of preprogrammed handsets which would offer instant local phone calls and voicemail to anyone within the radius of a WiFi antenna. This is not a Wireless ISP in a Box (WISP) with the possibility of some VOIP services overlayed on it. This is a local telephony solution with the possibility of upstream network connectivity for both voice and data. I make this distinction because voice is still the killer app i.e. delivers the most general utility and I think you need to deliver this service before all others.

What I am imagining is something like the Fon initiative but targeted at providing low-cost local voice services in Africa. Data is cool too but voice is the minimum entry point. Instead of buying a Fon wireless router, you as a local entrepreneur would buy a small Asterisk PABX that comes with a dozen or two pre-programmed phones. The whole thing should work out of the box with people simply needing to associate themselves with a phone extension. Voila! instant local phone calls and voicemail. Part of my theory of change is that a local phone service on its own would provide enough utility to warrant the investment. In December, I was at the Global Knowledge 3 conference in Malaysia where Ross O’Brian of the Economist Intelligence Unit mentioned statistics from Afghanistan that the majority of phone calls were local to the community they were initiated from. That started me wondering what percentage of phone calls are local in Africa, in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. If anyone has any evidence one way or the other I would love to hear about it.

Having said that, delivery of local voice and voicemail is just the tip of the iceberg. Ideally, a “village telco” device would easily connect to a regular phone line, mobile service, or Internet connection to offer upstream voice and/or interconnectivity. It would also offer a simple billing system that could be adapted to a variety of billing models based on pay-as-you-go, monthly accounts, or even barter.

This is NOT the Nokia-Siemens Village Connection

While I applaud the ingenuity that has gone into designing the Village Connection and the spirit of entrepreneurship that it hopes to engender, it seems to me that Nokia-Siemens’ decision to distribute the Village Connection through the mobile operator supply chain means that the Village Connection is only going to help entrench market control for mobile operators.

A “village telco” by contrast would allow villages/communities/organisations to choose their own interconnections and upstream providers, to use VOIP where it is most cost-effective and mobile/POTS services. It would also allow “village telcos” to interconnect among themselves.

It is not just in the realm of consumer choice that a “village telco” would be different in a very important way from the Village Connection. Based on a shared, transparent Open Source/Open Hardware model, the “village telco” would allow widespread entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation. Necessarily, a “village telco” would need to easily evolve to adapt to local realities. The Open Source model for the “village telco” creates a trusted open space for innovation to be fed back into the design.

This is not to say that that the “village telco” idea is not commerce-friendly. There are plenty of opportunities to provide upstream services to a “village telco”, to interconnect, to offer value-added services, etc.

Coexistence with Mobile Operators

Because a “village telco” would offer non-mobile (or at least limited to local WiFi coverage) services, it should be able to co-exist with mobile providers. There would still be a natural aspiration path to having a personal mobile phone that offers more flexibility (and perhaps status). Once connected to a mobile operator, every customer of the “village telco” has the potential to generate revenue for the mobile operator by dialing phone on their network.

But Why Stop at Voice and Data?

Pundits have been touting financial transactions as the next big thing for mobile markets and indeed the early success of initiatives such as mPesa appear validate these predictions. A plausible next step for a “village telco” would be to support a transaction system that could serve as a financial/barter proxy for a village/community. It open the possibility of providing local solutions to local economies. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.

Many Possibilities