CELLPHONES are changing lives for the better across the developing world, allowing farmers to use text and voice-based services to access crop and weather information,
for example. But nearly half the population in rural Africa cannot
access such services because of a lack of local infrastructure.
To help fix this, a team led by Elizabeth Belding
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, designed a cheap, local
cellular network called Kwiizya – which means "to chat" in Tonga, the
native language in Zambia's Southern Province. The idea is to give a
strong signal to villages which have poor, or even non-existent,
coverage.
In the Zambian village of Macha, many
villagers had to walk up to 5 kilometres to reach a hill where they can
get a signal on their phones, says Mariya Zheleva, who led the field
trials of Kwiizya. But what the village does have is a small Wi-Fi
network at the local hospital.
Kwiizya uses this Wi-Fi network to
relay a cell signal. Calls and text messages tend to be sent using a
communications standard called GSM, but this requires expensive hardware
and software to carry traffic between cell towers. Kwiizya's
open-source software translates GSM calls and texts into a format that
can instead be broadcast over the local Wi-Fi network. No subscription
is required and any phone can use its existing SIM card to access the
network, augmenting local coverage without forcing users to change
anything.
In the Macha trial, the team built two
simple cellphone towers 2.3 kilometres apart, connected via the
hospital's existing Wi-Fi network. Kwiizya's software can also use other
forms of connectivity as a backbone, including the unused parts of the
television spectrum.
Kwiizya can only handle local calls
for now, but that is what villagers need most. "When we told them about
Kwiizya they were super-excited," says Zheleva, who presented the system
at the MobiSys conference in Taiwan this week.
Tim Kelly,
who works on communications policy at the World Bank, says Kwiizya is a
good idea, but emphasises that it is economics, not technology, that is
holding back cell coverage in rural areas. He points to a World Bank
project in South Sudan where "diesel, bribes and taxes" are the biggest
issues.
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